PlayStation Subscriptions: The Good, the Bad and the Strategy - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] i don't know i'm just thinking like if navic if we had 600 million dollars in some account that got stolen i would want like some alert like like blaring in my house waking me up in the middle of the night like exactly when that happens so i can you know try to try to get on it as quickly as possible [Music] hello everyone welcome to the metacast round table by navik and today i'm joined by anil dasgupta cpo and co-founder of first light games aaron bush a co-founder of navic you've heard him a few times on the podcast and chong on vp head of americas at mythical games welcome everyone good to have you here thanks maria

hello oh and neil i think maybe your microphone it we couldn't hear your hello you're enthusiastic hello no i'm sorry everyone for these technical problems can you hear me now yeah yeah there we go okay yeah can hear you know about old school i'm sorry it's okay well it just represents what this week was i did all the prep for the podcast on the sunday i was ready to relax and settle into my working week and then tuesday happened and everyone decided they wanted to announce something exciting on tuesday so instead of playing elden ring i did podcast notes again so hopefully we're going to be talking about some hot news just happened uh we're recording this on a wednesday and so we're going to be briefly talking about axi infiniti's well is a ronin side chain um that was hacked we're going to keep a very high level because uh my co-host nico he's going to

be doing a deep dive on this and talking about the technicals on the next crypto corner episode so if you're interested in that definitely tune in to to that next episode we're going to be talking about the new playstation subscription tiers uh briefly celebrating the waitrose 4 announcement because i love the witcher and so i'm biased and i want to talk about it and then i have a secret topic if we still have some time we'll open the secret chest i'm gamifying this podcast now um introducing some loot boxes it was inevitable um okay [Laughter] um okay well in terms of the the first uh the first topic about the the hack very briefly in case you haven't read what happened um actually before we we talk about that i just want to do a huge shout out to sky mavis and their player base i hope you're okay i hope that will be resolved it's really sad that this

happened and hopefully everyone will get their funds returned it's really sad and so the the ronin side chain is an ethereum side chain for axia infinity that sky mavis is developing to then i believe be applied for other games and 620 million worth of ethereum and usdc were drained um using a bridge that connects with with ronin that connects ronan to the ethereum main net i think most of the funds are still in the wallet of the hacker but some of it has been sent to exchanges and um yeah i don't i don't even know what to say about this like maybe someone i'm not very in tune with the crypto world so how big is this hack compared to previous hacks in the history of crypto do you know chong yeah so from my limited research and just from talking to other colleagues it just seems to be

unconfirmed but it seems to be the largest hack that we've seen so far uh within you know web 3 blockchain you know up to date the one previous to this was polynetwork when you know they were also hacked in a kind of similar fashion you know by their various smart contracts a hacker exploited some vulnerabilities there and i think the unaudited amount at the time of the announcement this was back in 2021 um like august ish i think their hack was around 611 million dollars so that was also a pretty large hack um but you know as you just mentioned maria this is uh the verona network one is i think now it's like it's something like 624 622 624 and so yeah it's definitely at the at the top of the the leaderboard the leaderboard that you don't want to be at the top yeah you definitely don't want to add that to your resume um one other nuance just to kind of frame up the the

sizing of this i think i i think this technically is the largest hack um in fiat terms but you know if you go look back in time at some of the the earlier crypto hacks like mount gox in 2014 um you know in fiat terms it was worth like 460 million i think at the time but you know in today's price of bitcoin that like that it would be worth 40 billion dollars like now boxes were like 70 percent of the transaction volume of bitcoin occurred and you can look at um like the ethereum dow um hack in 2016 which completely like compromised uh i forget how much it stole but you know that that's also like worth you know over 10 billion dollars in like today's you know value in fiat terms um and those hacks i would say were more existential to just the crypto ecosystem at large and shaping up um you know what you know what the biggest um projects and um

blockchains were going to be so you know obviously like this and today's money terms is bigger than ever before which shows just the growth of the ecosystem that these acts are getting bigger but um it is less existential to crypto as a whole than some of the other hacks in the past although it absolutely like it could be existential to some of the stuff that sky mavis is building but we can maybe dig a bit more into that did they ever recuperate the funds from that hack which one the one that was done by the bitcoin couple was uh that one they did manage to get back so some have been but it is quite difficult um to do in general because you have to well as you say all eyes are on the wallet address right now to see where it goes i don't know if you've seen this that people leave messages on the wallet address they're like please sir send 10 e to me so i can feed my family and then there's people trying to scam the people that are asking for help i mean it's just

another dane crypto is what a lot of people would say which is um not often the best thing so it is pretty well there but yeah to answer your question there so in previous cases some of the funds were recovered for polly they weren't um for the the bitfinex one they they were um i i i question whether how much they'll be able to get out of this because these days there's so many ways to sort of you know launder the money quite frankly and in other exchanges although they do say that a lot a lot of the money's already gone to like one of a big exchange it's quite easy to track which is not maybe the smartest moves i'll be interesting to see i think um you know maybe to move ahead but i think this one you know is a security blower aaron asks is it an existential sort of question or is it more localized and this time round it appears to be you know what they call social engineering which means that basically it's an inside job now if that's the case you know that is more on the company than it is on the core security so i'm into eve myself so the ethereum one they had to fork ethereum from the main net and make a different version that's like how big a deal it

was and that's why you have ethereum classic and ethereum now so you can still actually buy and sell a theorem classic if you want to so that was a huge deal at the time and you know it was a big knock to the conference of that project although i think it's recovered quite well in this case you know you have to ask totally different questions because um you don't have to get to the technicalities of it but i mean if someone in your company stole 600 million from you i mean them just to be fair they want to say that jiho he was at an event and he um basically stood up on stage in front of everyone and and and went through and said it all and wow respect to anyone that has to do that i mean he really looks you can imagine what he looked like right i mean what must he be feeling at that point in time i'm in web 3 myself i have to say myself and my cto we were talking about it and it's just terrifying isn't it that something like that could happen imagine if your company had worked hard managed to raise those kind of funds and it's gone now luckily it hasn't really affected stock prices or the the token price uh because they had so much in

their reserve but still i mean mind-blowing absolutely mind-blowing yeah i can't i can't imagine i think maybe it's paying off how transparent skye mavis has been so far in terms of their communications even when they were talking about the price of slp tanking they're always very open about why that's happening and what they're going to do to improve it um i'm not too into this so i'm speaking from just what i see from very far i what i've seen from the community it's a message of support to sky mamas and not being toxic and saying that they're leaving and going into another game is that is that correct standpoint it is but i think from the crypto community in general it's less so because i think the issue here is that they did a massive raise of the successor vacci and they what is ronin roden is their own blockchain that they've built to

optimize transaction fees and you know build a platform into the company now of that 300 million if you've only got nine nodes to represent the security so you know the idea of any sort of blockchain is that you have to compromise over half of the nodes in existence at the right at the same time in order to hack it so with bitcoin miners if there's like two hundred thousand bitcoin miners or nodes in the world then you know it's almost impossible to have it it isn't possible to have that many pc for that many you know modes if you've only got nine five is maybe not that difficult especially when someone has access to four of them which is what happened here so i think the crypto community as a whole is more like you know that's pretty poor with that amount of money that not enough was done in the security side when you have that much you know like for example if it was just like a a startup that it had unimaginable success and it happened in the first week or two so i didn't remember like four guys uh how during the first month of that game there was like a lot of exploits going

on in the game and it's kind of like how they were just completely unprepared i think it was unfair to expect that they probably thought they might get like a couple of hundred thousand downloads and they ended up getting like i don't know 20 million or something ridiculous like that so when that sort of thing happens i think you can be a lot more forgiving when things go wrong but in this case you know if you are basically the world's number one crypto gaming company and that security exploit happens um i think you do have to ask questions that's certainly what the crypto community are doing and me i don't want to be too judgmental as i say me and matt who's our cto we're terrified i mean we've definitely put on our christmas list this year amazing cyber security dude or do theirs to hire for the company i think that's the takeaway here but um yeah i think from a technology point because it's not the technology that's the issue right it clearly leads someone inside compromise security and you have to ask questions as to how that was about to happen yeah i think it's kind of critical as the story develops to kind of like

remind ourselves that you know blockchain is not synonymous with security right you still have to and it's extremely important to audit you know your own security your own technologies your own applications and your smart contracts it's it's a critical piece of you know any platform you know technology stack so i think it's really critical and you know if you if you go into like the details of how this hacker found the exploits i do kind of agree with the neil on that uh it probably was some level of an inside job or there was at least some level of like knowledge transfer that was happening just because of how targeted this thing was i think it's really critical for any you know studio that's trying to come into the web3 space to really look at that and on the notes uh yeah it's really interesting too because it's a trade-off right um you know the more nodes you have i mean because ultimately what is it that you're trying to do you're trying to figure out uh how do you optimize for performance and transactions you know

how many nodes you really need for that you need to balance that against security and things of that nature and so i can see why they selected nine right i think others in the ecosystem if you actually go and take a look at some of the other platform players out there with you know looking at the number of validator nodes that they have it would be it's quite surprising it's not you know the 200 000 you know 500 000 it's much much less than that and so i think this particular you know incident is now going to put just about every single company on notice right they're going to have to go back and double down on looking at their security their architecture their infrastructure and i think it's going to be critical to really sort that out and you know in this instance i get it we're in a startup space you know velocity and building that flywheel is critical to trying to prove out your business model but it's slightly changed here right because there's real world you know you know you know asset and fiat implication and so taking your time

to really make sure you understand and also create security which then creates trust you know and so on and so forth i think it's super critical and i think it's going to be a watershed moment for people in web 3 to really like you know like get this dialed in yeah i wonder if it's going to change recruitment a little bit as well for web3 companies at least when i worked in fintech i had a very deep dive into who i am what's my past have i done anything shady and just showing my entire life before i got accepted through the security check so i don't know if we might see this going forward as well with people working in these kinds of tech i don't know in terms of game dev companies whether they will need to hire a cyber security expert or if that's just when for companies developing blockchain i don't know if someone could explain this to me because i'm not sure and there is that you probably do have

to and that is probably the likely change is that they're going to become very desirable and they're already probably ridiculous salaries are going to go up even more but you know who do you want to you know do your business with as a customer the games company that does have a really good cyber security expert or the one that doesn't i suppose if you're with the right blockchain it might get around it but yeah i mean that's the thing that we've learned is that crypto is an emerging space there's certainly a lot of potential for it but it's unregulated for a reason things like this can happen um i in a personal space likely not in the company but have been compromised before and had um crypto stolen from me and i can tell you like when you look at the wallet address that's got your money in it and you're just looking at it and there's nothing you can do that feeling is so bad i mean you know if that was a bank you just call your bank and say i did not authorize this transaction you'll probably get it back in a second instead it's just there taunting you forever you can be it said see it sent from wallet wallet to wallet and you know maybe in this case luckily you know they may be able to ban it from exchanges by by you know doing crypto forensics they call it

so that's something that could be done but um yeah i think to there will be a lot more emphasis placed on security but perhaps you could argue that is a good thing because otherwise this was going to happen at some other point and what if it happened to like uh i don't know well if there was like a government-based crypto or it had people's pensions funds locked away in it or something like that and that got compromised and i have heard that now the world's number one profession unofficially is haka and i think unfortunately that might grow even more because the people here that's sort of things that you can get i mean people are gonna be interested in doing it yeah and to your to your point maria about like you know having to do background checks on people and that kind of thing um it sort of is antithetical to a lot of what um crypto stands for you have a lot of pseudonymous accounts and things like that um you know ideally and i forget what company it is that has this they've sort of have made like whereas google's like tagline was like don't be evil you know they sort of made theirs like can't be evil in the sense that you know like the the technology

and security like just and the underlying protocols and systems that are built are robust enough where even if you did have a bad actor they they just wouldn't be able to get away with doing something evil um and you know breaking the system or stealing money and things like that and obviously that's easier said than done but i think um when you when you kind of look at i guess just like a big trend right now is the idea of progressive decentralization where a lot of teams especially in the games industry they start out pretty centralized with the idea of like yeah as we grow uh we'll you know we'll add more of those nodes or you know we'll we'll continue to grow the system and increase the number of validators or the amount of staking that's going to protect the network or you know whatever the process may be but i think um progressive decentralization like this is an instance where like like you know maybe that's fine and maybe it's needed um in a lot of cases but it should really like this is a reminder that you still really have to force that same level of rigor into

those security practices at the beginning so that can't be evil um is much more the reality than than don't be evil and so yeah i sort of expect you know like things like events like this kind of catalyze more of that just that natural rigor across the board and you know there's always going to be like attack vectors so you know hacking is never going to go away security issues are never going to go away but um i mean i still think there are you know just yeah nico will get into the you know the technical sides of all the lessons to learn but there are just some bigger lessons to learn right around like the number of nodes that you have the number of uh nodes that a single party controls how that single party controls those nodes and like a single client versus you know multiple different clients um etc so um yeah i i hope teams learn from this and even those that pursue progressive decentralization can can learn and improve from the faults of of this one

yeah so totally unconfirmed i read this on one single twitter uh tweet if that's how you call the messages i think their tweets right um and someone has said that the hacker had bought short it went short on the tokens and so actually the way that they were expecting to make money was hoping that it would hang like sky maybe tokens they would tank to then get money i have no idea this is true like i said i i'm not in this space is that actually something that a person could do in in the web 3 world sure i think there's a lot of i mean you could have a lot of conspiracies around the ways that you could approach this um like i mean like like that is one maybe they you know give it all back but they have some other you know financial position on the side that they still benefit in some way or we've seen other hacks where you know they still you know however hundreds of millions or however millions um and then they end up giving most of it back you know you know acting like a white hacker but then

they'll you know keep 10 million or so for themselves sort of as like the fee for finding the exploit um and so i think i mean there there are a lot of games to play obviously whoever has the the 600 million dollars sort of has the leverage to kind of dictate um how they play the game unfortunately and not to say they won't get caught or anything like that i've absolutely no idea but yeah just to say sure like it's a big financial market they are moving it it's it's insane that it took six days to realize that the the money was stolen that's kind of the other piece of this again nico can go into the technical details but you know it's the kind of thing that like i don't know i'm just thinking like if navic if we had 600 million dollars in some account that got stolen i would want like some alert like like blaring in my house waking me up in the middle of the night yeah exactly what that happened so i can you know try to try to get on it as quickly as possible so so yeah that part um is was a bit crazy too and

i've still been a little surprised by you know ronan was only down like 20 percent and you know access was only down five percent and you know you can say that like yeah i guess like those funds weren't affected like it's a lot easier to steal some eath than to steal the entirety of of you know like axey infinity um and have that you know still be worth something but um yeah lots of games to to play financially yeah i think from an outside looking in perspective it it kind of reminds me that the best practices of non-web3 tech is still not fully in place perhaps if for web3 you know you'd have automated dashboards with automated alerting if something happened in your technology for you to know about and i don't know if this doesn't exist yet in side chains and blockchains and wallets that's my point i think aaron put it there perfectly as well you've got to ask yourself that as a question i mean again it is not like an amateur company now when you've done like a huge series a again i think if this was like an overnight let's say if this would happen

a year ago when the game was blowing up i think that would be a totally different conversation and then i think the support would be completely in favor of them but they didn't expect such a huge success and how could you have prepared but it's like when you've had this amount of time you know what they have been doing is they've been trying to fix the economy in the game which is fair enough because that's what all the players are kind of complaining about but you know you're literally painted the biggest bullseye in the world on your head when you can literally see the treasury on a you know any kind of either scan and see how much they've got any kind of coin market type site so yeah there's no excuse for not to have that kind of stuff it's not that difficult to have an alert to say that like x amount has left your treasury today you know you don't need to use web through protocol to do that so that's really interesting why the community is is you know a little bit um i wouldn't say angry by yeah i mean for example if you go into like the reddit groups or discords and things like that there's been some less than favorable opinions put on what's happened to be

honest yeah so i think just to wrap up then the the hack topic i think chong what what do you think this hack means for sky mavis and axi infinity yeah i think anil and i i think aaron already kind of like i think answered the question i think ultimately i mean look like i think it was a geo or whoever was on stage at nftla i mean he kind of set it on stage right like and i think they said it in their official you know blog you know website uh they're talking about how they're gonna continue to build how they're gonna continue to support you know their product in their studio which you know is absolutely the right call they're going to learn from this you know experience and it was a very painful and expensive lesson but i think they'll be better for it i think all the all the raising that they've done is going to you know come in very handy right so you know to some degree it's fortuitous that they actually had a war chest of things that they can then you know lean on you know in the time of you know these things right now they're gonna probably have to reprioritize a bunch of things but you

know i think it's a it's a lesson that a lot of us in web 3 are going to benefit from but ultimately i don't think it's going to affect them um you know detrimentally or i don't think it's catastrophic it might seem that way right now but i think you know net net and i'm sure niko will get into this but i think net they're gonna find out that all of this could have been prevented right like they probably took their eye off the ball on certain aspects um and they're gonna get tightened up and you know the the thing that i'm the reason i'm a little bit bullish on them is because ultimately web 3 and web 3 products and you know d apps it's really about the community right and the fact that the community is still very supportive like aaron pointed out the the fact that their token even though it dropped in value it actually didn't drop in value as much as i expected it would it would and so you know there's some you know i think implications there although one could probably argue that maybe because they froze a bunch of things maybe that's why but we'll see that all play out in the coming weeks but i i think yeah they're gonna learn from this um they're hurting

now but i think they'll recover yeah i don't think this is too hopefully oh sorry i was gonna say i don't think this is too existential to actually infinity the game um there's a chance that it does have larger implications for ronin itself as you know a platform that others would want to build on over time i think you know probably whether or not you know they can get money back might have a big effect on how people perceive building on ronin in the the near future which still kind of matters when there's lots of competition out there where people can build on lots of different um platforms um but yeah i agree with chong i think we've seen pretty strong leadership from the team pretty transparent communication um at this point you know i admire what they're doing sucks said it happens lessons to learn but i think they're doing a good job in the aftermath as best they can well thanks um thanks for sharing your thoughts i was very insightful um it's good to get a bit more context on on

what it means from someone who's not not in that space and one thing i learned is that there's crypto forensics i sound so cool i don't know if i'm the only one who wants to see a spin-off of csi doing crypto forensics but that's great please okay i'm gonna kick start this get some funding um no no i won't so yeah we'll we'll then move to talk about the new playstation plus subscription and i really thought about this cool intro so i'm going to say it let spartacus be unleashed was that was good right it was great okay okay um for poor reactions um i will try to minimize how much i'm describing so i'm sure a lot of people have read what what the subscription or what the subscription tiers are so there's uh basically what playstation plus is today that's going to be called essential

um you know two free games a month and access to multiplayer and a few more things then where there's going to be um a playstation plus extra a bit i think that name could be a little bit prettier but essentially it's the same thing as the essential tier and then you can play up to 400 playstation 4 or playstation 5 games i assume it's a mix of them and you can download these games and it's four about five pounds more than the other tier and finally there's a third tier which is the premium option it has um the benefits of the essential and the extra tier that i just described with an additional 340 games that includes ps3 titles via streaming plus a catalog of streaming and downloading ps2 original playstation and psp games um yeah and i think you also get some kind of time limited trials to test the game before deciding to buy it and that is

17.99 a month so i think if i were to subscribe it seems like a good tier to to pay every month um depends on how much you like ps3 games i i suppose so yeah i think mixed reactions from what i've seen um in terms of the reporting on it i think some of the games they're going to release released with are like death stranding god of war uh the spider-man's murder combat eternal um but they did clarify they're not going to make any upcoming exclusive playstation titles available on launch through the subscription so that is a bit different from how xbox is operating and in the space um aaron do you do you have a playstation i do what do you think of these tiers yeah i mean what they've done it makes sense to me um they've made what is playstation plus the base tier which is still like a it's a pretty solid base tier service but

what they've done is the you know playstation has a base of over like 100 million units um and they're basically adding tiers to it so that the people who want to be more deeply engaged can and they can you know improve the ltvs on their you know their loyal player base um without completely disrupting their business model um which um you know that that's sort of like the kind of the big comparison between playstation and xbox it's just the the main difference is the day one releases um and i think the fact of the matter is that probably like would break um playstations business model like they would just be giving up quite a bit of upside for them to be able to make that shift at least in the near term um in a way that microsoft with its you know like who has more money than microsoft right um you know they just have much more like capital to be able to support something like game pass running at lower margins or at a loss as

it scales up over time um so i mean i think you know playstation even if they're not competing exactly with um game pass it's gonna be totally fine um they're still gonna dominate this console generation as long as they continue to put out really amazing games people are gonna be willing to pay for them on top of subscriptions and they can build a really great business out of it they already have one and it'll just continue to improve and so i think that's kind of the bottom line here i think as you look out over a longer period of time i mean it's pretty clear that playstation is doubling down on like the soul playstation console experience whereas something like um xbox game pass is really doubling down on the play anywhere on any device experience and i think that you know even though playstation what they're doing is great for them it'll be fine they'll continue to dominate this console generation i can't i still have the thought in the back of my mind that um really like what

xbox is doing though like that is more the business model disruption that ultimately probably like it's a better deal no question for consumers um and i think that says a lot especially when it is accessible across all devices and so i think that you know maybe in the same way that i think i've made this analogy before just in the same way that like nintendo has become increasingly niche over time as it's just kind of focused on its own lane as the industry around it has grown i could see a similar trend like that happening to playstation over the next decade or so by continuing to just focus in on playstation whereas something like microsoft is focusing on kind of like a bigger expanded goal um but you know as a playstation i have game pass on pc and i will absolutely be subscribing to you know one of these tiers probably one of the higher tiers on on playstation as well so there's room for more than one uh winner even though they take you know different tactics and approaches

is is this a life of a co-founder you can play enough games to have two subscriptions hey i'm just like yeah i'm trying to you know one of the next steps hopefully for navic is like i can't wait to you know add like an expense line for you know people to start you know expensing you know certain games and stuff like that that'll be the dream come true once i can you know get to that you know sooner than than later but i wish i had more time to play games but i i will still absolutely be there even if i check in on playstation less than i'd like to well hopefully that benefit really close to podcast hosts uh sorry anil what are you saying aaron your opinion on this do you feel that like the the move they've done here is it like an offensive move or a defensive move in terms of what it means because i agree with you that that sony definitely going to win this console generation but microsoft are basically well but game passes netflix for games which is and if you look at which of

those two makes in the long term more money it's going to be the netflix model and and at some point if someone becomes really popular you know i've always thought how long is it going to be till we see microsoft game pass on the sony console if there was enough demand for it so i asked the question is do you think this is like trying to really make their offering so compelling that you would never even question that or is it because they kind of fear what could happen and they're trying to show up their bases and just uh i'll be interested in your opinion yeah i mean i don't think it's a super offensive move they're not trying to be as disruptive as like an xbox is doing i i also i mean it probably is more defensive than it is offensive although i they're still doing their own thing in their own way um so i wouldn't say it's incredibly defensive from that lens they also have are in a great position of strength right now so they can kind of set the terms that they want and it's not to say that they can't eventually you know five years from now kind of shift more into the

into more of a game pass model i don't think they're thinking about doing that right now but it's not out of the realm of possibility um in my mind it's just more of like a more of a classic like innovator's dilemma story um where it actually like if they wanted to compete on the basis of a new business model that is actually kind of disruptive um in the industry and great for consumers it would hurt them so they don't want to do anything that would hurt them and typically the companies that are the biggest and have are coming from the biggest positions of strength they're the last ones to kind of cave and be affected by those more innovative business models gaining traction over longer periods of time so you know i think game pass probably has a bigger effect on smaller companies than it has on playstation right now but if if their business model truly is onto something and is able to scale over a long period of time it'll inevitably have some effect on playstation in the long run it'll just take quite a bit of time for that to really be felt i

think yeah if i see this from i don't know my personal product manager perspective i think just looking at the data the tiers just feel like the the safe and obvious approach to take you know i think 72 of the install base subscribes to playstation plus and five percent of the player base uh subscribe to playstation now so it just felt like a natural move to combine the two and simplify your your product offering without being too risky um i was wondering chong you know with your with your vp vp background do you think potentially playstation could win the long game by having more stability in their pricing i assume at some point um xbox game pass is going to have to start creeping up its subscription price a little bit like netflix where i'm just so engrained into my netflix they could increase it three pounds tomorrow and i'd still stay on

yeah you've just increased the price yeah right yeah just increase your price right i think yeah i think that's a really good question because i mean just to kind of cover off on i think what aaron and neil was kind of pointing out um i wouldn't characterize what sony's doing as defensive i think you know i think you said it earlier aaron like it's all about ltv it's about increasing arpu um it's more like a retentive tool than anything else right like you already have majority of your player base on sony you know subscribing to you know this pass or whatever you want to call it and so i think they're really just doubling down on how do we keep our users you know within our ecosystem enjoying our content and not you know churn out or even explore you know let's say something on xbox right so i think part of it part of it is that makes a lot of sense um you know combining these different things so there's less uh merchandising confusion when you actually go into the marketplace so i think in that sense they definitely you know did what we think is the obvious choice and i think it all makes sense

right but what i think is the long-term implication here is look what microsoft's been doing you know they're actively going out and you know acquiring studios and you know with this uh you know blizzard acquisition uh blizzard activision acquisition that's in motion right that's a mouthful um assuming that passes you know legal regulation and it allows to pass i mean microsoft is now really beefing up the amount of content that they can provide which could also be on their path right which then creates a really interesting value proposition especially if they continue to do day and date right of like you know new releases which is where i think the key difference is i don't know that xbox will do that you know into the future especially when they have all this content that they can make exclusive and they can essentially develop a much more liveops feel which is what sony is doing right now you know i think um their studio had uh you know mentioned something along the lines of like

virtuous cycle not being broken so when i hear that i'm thinking you know their strategy is pretty sound right like if you have the path you get great content of you know old products you know relatively new products so on and so forth and then you have these ten poll launches with their you know amazing exclusive games on their platform so you have like this continued like drip of engagement all throughout the year which is sony strategy versus microsoft where it's just like day and date and it's it's really about just pushing all that content to you when and when you want it whenever it's made available but how is that going to sustain over the long run you know with price point content and so on and so forth so when i look at that ecosystem it feels like xbox is doing and setting up for the long game and how is that going to affect sony into the future i think that's going to be the question mark but sony's not stupid either right like they understand that which is why when they when acquired bungie which a lot of people i think looked at as a reaction to oh you

know microsoft's going doing this that and the other we know that's not true right like you know things in the m a space take a long time you know for it to occur it's going to take time for these deals to happen all the major players are speaking to each other on a regular basis so i think sony's aware and i think their strategy is a lot more sound in the long term it's just the big question mark is how is microsoft's current moves going to affect the broader you know landscape as there's a lot more consolidation and how is that going to affect their business model that like i don't have it's a big question mark but um i think sony will dominate for at least the short to mid term but i i i think xbox or microsoft rather i think they're setting themselves up for that longer term play and they will become i think a very very you know a challenger for sure and then maybe we'll see a reversal of fortunes right where microsoft will maybe be the place where like hey all the contents over there now all the studios that are you

know breaking records and you know you know you know purchasing of these amazing games well i would be foolish as a consumer of you know a lover of games not to go there i think that's really what they're going for and then you know i think i think aaron said it earlier about game pass just being able to play products whenever you go they're the ones with the technology to do all that right and they've kind of proven it so i don't know it just seems like there's a lot of really strong pillars on the microsoft side to potentially you know convince fans into the future but they're just learning from this current console generation which yeah they made some missteps and i think they're going to really double down the next time around yeah i think i i can what i picture when reading the comparisons between the different subscription models of of these consoles i almost imagine you know micro microsoft and sony there are two continents just in this competition with each other and then you have nintendo that has their safe little island and no one can penetrate it it's just very

secure and that's where they're happy and they dominate um and i think you can see that through the the subscription model of nintendo where you get access to classics that are a huge nostalgia factor and i think nintendo players the price the price point also seems very attractive and you can sign up i i just found it so interesting how they are targeting i believe they're player based with a specific model that that appeals to them one one additional thing i'll throw in here is i think the way that sony and playstation bundled their offering right with like you know having multiplayer as part of like you know their pass and so on and so forth i think all of that was really smart but i think they have their key markets like lockdown right so you know the the skus that they have that you can purchase i think is pretty uh you know it's similar or the same but if you kind of look at their fine print and i think i can't speak for microsoft because i don't know the xbox xbox pass

as well but if you look at sony's fine print as it relates to the past depending on what region you're in right you get slightly different offerings right and so what kind of fragmentation is that also going to create you know in the broader landscape and is microsoft you know going to set up their pass in a way where it's a little bit more you know steady state it's you know it's similar no matter where you're at those little things are also going to matter i think into the future so um i think sony has definitely they got to look at that to some degree so they don't alienate fans from like one region to another especially for these broader multiplayer type games and so yeah i mean they might be losing margins in those areas and they should be really cognizant of that because uh there's a fight coming for sure and it's gonna be pretty epic i do have oh epic yeah i do have yeah i do have one um thought to to play forward that i'm kind of curious to get your your thoughts on um so it seems to me like if this

uh consolidation path continues and the consolidation tends to lead itself to exclusives um and you just have like you know a handful of giants with enormous catalogs of exclusives that that is where the like the antitrust regulatory issues will start to be raised and um i feel like like it's inevitable it'll get to that point and really i mean what do i know but it seems like the the two solutions there then become all right either you have less um exclusives that are specific to one subscription service or one platform or you allow the subscription services to be accessible on on all of the platforms um and so i'm curious um i mean it might be something where the companies have less say in it than they want over time but uh you know if we look forward say like 2025 2026 like what do you think the odds are that xbox

game pass is available on on playstation and maybe something vice versa too i like this question yeah that's a really good question um 2025 let's see so three years from now i still don't think it's gonna happen not within the next three years right because like and the reason i say this is because some of these exclusives you know some of these products some of these acquisitions of studios and ips that they're developing i mean you know you know the development timelines are getting longer they're more expensive so on and so forth so maybe we'll get like one or two like interesting exclusive and then we'll see like the market outcomes from that so twenty twenty five minutes maybe like probably uh i don't think when playstation six rolls around does that change anything yeah that could i could have see something like that right i could i think it is possible just because ultimately at the end of the day you know these corporations are you know trying to min max their roi right and you know they're looking at their p l they're trying to

get a larger digital footprint and you know it's hard it's hard to you know keep uh you know gamers interested especially if you're then forcing the consumer to then start really having to pick right and you know have all this upfront you know all this additional cost so i could see some cooperation there i could also see though some type of clause within the way that you know games that are quote unquote exclusive to a particular platform after x amount of time it just becomes you know that that exclusivity clause breaks and now they can then publish on a variety of other i could see something like that working as well and so yeah i think they're going to come up with a variety of different you know business models to yeah you know like make sure like they're not under the regulatory crosshairs and also you know makes it good for the consumers and so on and so forth but that's a good question man i'm gonna have to noodle on that one after this one [Laughter] but sorry you're gonna say something i kind of thought maybe playstation six is still a little bit too soon but i i genuinely think within 10 years you will

see the option of having game pass on the sony console because i think you can already get the netflix app on your ps5 and you can watch it so if there's a game splits which is what netflix themselves are sort of trying to do as well the demand would be there and strike a deal in the background that certainly takes x amount of percentage or something like that i mean i think that's clearly microsoft's goal with with game pass that's what they want to do i think it's a really good offering for that right now as you say they're buying up all the content that some point in time as he describes the consolidation goes crazy when they have so many games on there the consumer is going to feel like they're missing out if they can't have it on their playstation so i think it's inevitable that it will happen unless that was like my prior question shooting there i kind of feel maybe this often whilst it was sensible if they're not going really aggressive i think that will be the inevitable thing to happen so why aren't the sony exclusives available on it at launch you know that that would be a real talking point then you'd be like oh okay they they're coming here to fight they're not just here to to stay on their continent and

watch what the other continent is doing on the other side to come to your analogy but i i could definitely be wrong but i just feel that once the offering is good enough and there's so many people subscribed to it it may not be possible and i also think like the changing demographics of people buying consoles is also quite important here so as someone who sort of grew up with playstation 1 and playstation 2 back then it was very much sort of teenagers or kind of like 18 to 24 cool things to get a playstation one now most people on playstations tend to be kind of like 30s plus like how many teenagers really buy consoles these days it's more about their phone so sony playstation and xbox to some extent have become more sort of luxury products like having like it's a much more premium experience the games are more expensive the console's more expensive but you play a really great game when you buy that and you invest into that system on your really nice tv tv that you've got at home so how sustainable is that at some point again if then microsoft has a load of content that appeals to everyone including younger audiences you might need that to make your console relevant

to audiences other than these guys that getting older and older like myself and becoming more and more washed up and you know to sort of restart or give it a refresh you need some of this content so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out um i have noticed a reason that you know microsoft seemed to be more friendly towards sony too i've seen sometimes in some of their kind of medium presence like that they've gone like oh great job sony for doing this thing and sometimes when i see things like that i feel like yeah they're kind of not right now maybe not even in five years but at some point it's like extend the olive branch and say hey you know i mean as someone who grew up with games from very all the time did you ever think you'd see like sega games on the nintendo but that's been real life for like over 10 years now so the stranger things have happened is what i would say that won't wait to call out our age i know i was i was about to say i have a playstation 2. and now i don't want to live that i'm i'm in my 30s [Laughter] so um does anyone else have thoughts on on

this discussion no okay well we'll see what happens in the next few years i personally will love to have xbox game pass on my playstation i will always buy playstation to play final fantasy so if i could just access other games whilst waiting for the exclusives that would be pretty cool so microsoft and sony if you're listening please please give us this christmas present and so we we only have about 10 minutes left in this episode so i don't think we're going to discuss uh the new witcher um because we're briefly going to discuss about game engines and i want to take some time to deep dive into that so what does this mean oh i need i need to ask evan to maybe add a little theme music when we're going to open a secret chest i don't know try to give that that celebration of the loot box moment um i'm really leaning into this

so a mini clip exceeded four billion downloads so the way that i put this in my brain is that the world's population is 7.9 billion people and mini clips downloads or about half the world population now i know that you know the same people do multiple downloads so i'm not talking that that population played mini clip but i just thought wow that is a huge huge number um i personally grew up playing mini mini clip games aaron did you have mini clip in the united states 100 yep great times what were you playing oh man um i remember playing a lot of that tanks game where i don't know if like you like you have the it's like you and someone else like going against each other in your different color tanks and then you like try it it starts out you like shoot the little like single ball projectiles to try to hit them and then if you hit them you like get money and then you can like

level up to like these like missiles and different shots um i remember that i remembered like like dirt bike games um and stuff you know you just go through different courses i don't know i played so many that was like probably some of my like my formative times of like starting to play games was on on miniclip after school yeah how about you chung yeah i mean i was laughing about the about the tank game because uh yeah i i spent a fair amount of time playing that game i remember because i mean it was like it was like an evolved version of worms essentially right um but like there was just so much i mean the accessibility just like the the goofy kind of you know ephemeral nature of those games and how ubiquitous they were during that age of i think when games you know that were on browsers on websites and so on and so forth like they were just at the forefront of that and yeah for some of us that kind of grew up i mean i got my first console when i

first went to university that's the first time i actually bought myself a console but before then it was always like at a friend's house whatever but i always had access to a pc right so being able to go online and yeah jump into a game without any you know real cost associated to me was fantastic and you know i've been a fan of them ever since right because they're very good at diversifying games just in general but they're also very good at finding these evergreen products that just stand the test of time right like like like look at their eight ball pool kind of product like it's the test of time i think there was a version of it in the back back in the days on the mini clip site so like i played the heck out of that game because i was super into a billiards at one point but yeah there's some really good games that they've been able to develop over the years i'm not surprised at all that they got to this amazing milestone because um they're very good at being agile you know moving to new platforms understanding what you know you know players like and things like that so

yeah good memories for sure how about you i know it's been stolen i mean that was the game right i'm not even talking about the new one now where you can kind of it's not the meta where you can upgrade the cues and the ball and all this i mean like the old school one the one that was pure t 2d overhead like i've got a funny anic though i remember i used to do it for my a levels and i got detentions a few times because i was maybe not the most best student there was been but for detention for whatever reason they left you in the class with a computer right so i i felt like my detentions were made up of like april paul with like my friend having a great time it wasn't the worst thing in the world so as you say like you know back then i did still have like a console but that was like a great way to goof off whilst being at school and back then i don't think they had the concept of banning certain websites so mini club.miniclip.com was a fantastic place to go to and that game was like you know one of the first or social pvp games

that you could play you know back then this was before anyone understood anything about meta games and things like that so you just really played pool against one another over and over but it was great then and it's still great now so yeah i agree with exactly what ca says i mean that's an amazing they've done it for so long so long that must have been back i mean i'm getting scared that might have been early 2000s but i've got a feeling it was out there and now in 2022 people still play that game plus all their other games they successfully transitioned to mobile i think they had a few teething problems with that originally but now they've done it very successfully all their games are very pick up and play addictive they're fun and i think they got acquired by tencent for something like was it 110 million or something like that i mean that's got to be a bargain now when you look back at that to have something that's got that good user base and that consistent how much they work now i i have no idea but that's phenomenal numbers for such a a small pickup so yeah i think they deserve a round of applause they've also done it i feel with games that are not particularly predatory or offensive it's

just like a lot of their games are just good clean fun you know it's like you play it and you might not ever have spent any money but your attention is like ridiculous like you know you might have played a wall pool for 10 years i mean how many downloads has that title alone got i i wouldn't be surprised if one billion of that four billion it was it was actually it was yeah wow okay that's a great guess i was going to say i think then probably subway surfer is probably like the only game that's been downloaded more than that but i could understand why because like you know subway server is like another one there's like a timeless game that you can just play relentlessly and that's what it is so yeah i've got really fun memories of them and i i think it's nice that you brought it up i think it's it's nice to have good news and to you know commend someone for doing such a great job for such a long time yeah it's impressive my my games were um save the sheriff and it was the introduction to the first mmo i used to play a lot of runescape i love making bread and runescape that was that was really fun yeah and adele you've brought up some vibrates too

sorry this is sort of a tangent but i guess like i grew up as like more computers were like and like laptops were entering like classrooms and people got their own devices and i mean even uh like earlier school days like you know we'd go to the computer lab and you know you know just be on random applications and i remember i remember when like miniclip was like the full rage at school ever like the laptop the the carts with all the laptops would come out and it would be like yes it's game time even though like that wasn't the intention at all and people just go like straight to miniclip and and and play games and i remember like this was also the time of course where like schools they start trying to ban like websites uh where like kids would be spending their time playing games and things and i i think that like the best thing this is a total tangent but the best website i totally forget the name it was in the browser but the screen looked like it was a file folder and so like it would look like a

word doc a powerpoint doc and every one of those um icons would link to a to like a different browser game um and um every day they would refresh the the links so that it would like get past whatever was blocked but i remember the very beginning of that it linked to like it's on to many clip games and then you know they had to evolve but yeah this was a a fantastic a fantastic super random era of games but i i love it yeah and i think hopefully it will continue for many years at least you know if i ever have children i think the first exposure i'd give them to games is allow them to go on miniclip exactly because they're mostly safe games and i can trust them to just be on it and play whatever they want um so maybe that generation that grew up playing miniclip maybe now they'll also pass it on to the next the next generations that are that are coming through um chong what what do you think

a company needs to have or needs to be in order to achieve this long-term success throughout you know potentially decades yeah great question i mean my pov on miniclip is that you know one i think the angle that you just called out they're very conscious about who their target players are right i mean you know they have a they have a an immense catalog of products you know everything from sports you know whether it's like you know football or you know basketball or like american football like they have so many different you know you know genres of games right and they got like mmo type games and you know they got you know just like ridiculous games that don't make any sense right which is just for fun and creativity but you know underlying all of that is there's a wholesomeness to their product line right which resonates with both adults you know you know and teenagers as well as you know children and i think that's

really the strength of how they've been able to grow at the you know no pun intended at the clip that they've been able to grow at right and so i think it's really just you know strong how they've done that but also it's really important to you know call out um how robust our tech sac is to be completely honest so if you think about you know some of these really interesting multiplayer games that they've been able to develop over the years i remember when um agar.io and io game started coming onto the scene right like nothing exploded and i all honestly thought in the very beginning there's no way this is multiplayer right this is all like you know bots right it's just like you know pretending to be but they've kind of understood and figured out the the essential balance between you know fun factor first you know quick and fast production turnaround time so we can get products to market and validate because most of their games you can't really say that they have the best you know let's say graphical fidelity right and so from a product perspective it's

really honing in on like the experience the system's design you know the the core loop and they're really good at doing that right and so you know over time as you know meta plays and metal loops became a thing you know longer term progression not just bite size you know gameplay for you know you know that you play for a couple minutes at a time well then they've been able to layer that experience on top and you know continue to build more robust and more you know interesting products right and now they're in a position because yeah four billion downloads you know acquisitions they have a war chest um i wouldn't be surprised if they start going out and you know trying to build out more complex more robust products in addition to this like lineup of you know generalized products that anyone can kind of go after so i think their their foundation is extremely strong i guess is the point that i'm trying to make and you know now it's all about where do they want to start growing business and you know tangential you know areas of you know the development and you know we'll see

what that what they can do from there but yeah it's a very very strong foundation that's very hard to replicate that's a super interesting take i hadn't thought about that well strong prediction here let's see what miniclip does in the future it'll be interesting to see if if they explore more complex games when you're expressing your thoughts i just i was thinking perhaps did miniclip inspire this generation of hyper-casual games on move all i mean that's a that's a really good point i mean you know i think both you know for aaron and for neil and even you marie i mean i think we all i think have fond memories right of playing on like mini clips websites or you know now into mobile but i i personally will say i've been inspired by games that i played when i was younger you know on a website somewhere in a browser somewhere because then it sparked my curiosity my creativity which then extrapolated into some other experiences downstream right so yeah i think it has the potential for

that right um i think it's both on the i guess if we're being if you're looking at taxonomy of like genres hyper casual for sure i think casual market for sure um you know what i would consider like arcade sports for sure right like i think they've touched on all of those in a very successful way and so did those products inspire other products downstream i would probably say yes well congratulations mini clip um hopefully we'll see you reach i don't know 8 billion downloads to reach the world population uh let's see who overtakes who uh well thank you so much for for coming to this episode i know it was the first time we were together as as this group so it's nice to always see a new mix of people um joining us panelists hopefully you enjoyed it yeah for sure it was fine yeah good imagine if you said that you hated it live on an episode that then is going live you had to say yes so yes

we were fishing for for compliments um yeah if you want to continue this discussion you can find us on navic's discord uh we're there so send us a message very happy to continue talking about this and hopefully and maybe we'll see discussion on the witcher the new witcher in the next episode and yeah thanks for joining and we'll see you next week [Music] you