Risks of Sequels, Leaks and Permanent Loss Game Design Mechanics - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] it hasn't worked out well for them because their email address was hacked they were doxed and then all of a sudden their source code is not for sale anymore uh the hackers disappeared all the footage that was getting uploaded to the internet has been taken down for copyright [Music] hi friends welcome to the mastercast round table by navic today I'm joined by Matt Diane lead product manager at EA and contributor in navic and also Anthony picarella co-founder at level up labs and contributor at navic as well it's a navic family hello hi hello I'm I'm going to experience the jingle since our last failure um in the previous recording to be jingle wise

so yeah it's starting to be full here in England I hope somewhere out there someone's listening to this with the beautiful sunny day so that will live vicariously through your happiness sunny here in L.A um um oh wow okay cool I'm so happy for you Max [Laughter] away from the snow yeah in England we don't even really get snow it's just Gray anyway on to happy topics um today we're going to be talking about uh GTA's leak don't know if that is a happy topic um OverWatch too I'm discussing whether it's a sequel or or a restructuring of the game and also discussing risk in game design so it'll be more of an exploratory topic um yeah before we dive into the the topics I don't know if you've seen X

hero we briefly spoke about it before I was just I just started playing it yesterday where it has the save the doge is that how you pronounce it it's not dog right it's Doge yeah no Doge I think yeah um um yeah it's an idol it's like an idol battler mixed with a doge game there's a lot circulating through social media now on why it's just it is a success I had a lot of fun I love saving those from the little piece yeah I go so I have the first topic which is the OverWatch whether it's a sequel or a restructure um and when I started looking into it it was extremely interesting so I'm excited to talk about it um there was a bit of turbulence with between the announcement and the development journey of OverWatch OverWatch we're not going to dive into it um but basically OverWatch 2 arrives on October 4th and it's going to replace OverWatch Prime they're not going to live side by side the two arrives and so the October 2nd

is the last day that you can play OverWatch prime before it gets replaced and OverWatch 2 is going to bring some major changes uh the game is going to be free to play it's no longer going to be premium they will have cross-platform play and progression and you can actually link up uh multiple platforms onto your Battle.net account so that you can keep for example you have different progression on different accounts or if you have purchases between accounts you can merge and keep them all and yeah there's a whole migration process that I believe you can start going through they're going to continue to no longer have a loot box monetization they removed it from OverWatch Prime at the end of August uh with the reasoning that you know they were they knew that the game was going to be replaced and they didn't want to they wanted to avoid like difficulties of people spending a lot of money um and then having to go into the free-to-play realm

the monetization model is going to be battle Pass based um purchasing the premium battle pass will give you access to the new characters but if you don't buy the premium tier you can still unlock the characters by completing the the free the free um track of the battle pass it'll just take you longer and a way that they're mitigating this competitively so we're also have a brief discussion on it is that the new characters will be playable in the competitive mode for a few weeks and this is to allow the game developers to balance um before having skin in the game but also to give players who are free to play the opportunity to to earn the new characters before they can bring an advantage in the competitive mode and the seasonal Cadence of the game with the battle pass that renews every nine weeks is also going to be the Cadence to release new features new characters Maps skins so they've also changed their

production processes so the first question I want to put out there Anthony you can go first so what do you think is OverWatch 2 correcting mistakes from the past and introducing a new business model or is it a sequel uh I mean it sounds a lot like I guess you know there are questions around you know how much of the characters are new and how different is the gameplay and all of that but it really seems like OverWatch 2.0 might be a better way to to put it um you know if you're if you're replacing an original that's I think pretty clear that you're kind of moving to a new model like it sounds a little bit like um uh was it the Lord of the Rings game that went from premium to free to play um Lord of the Rings online or something like that I think um there was a couple of games that have made that pivot and have had a tremendous amount of success and I uh I suspect you know they

probably weren't getting as much regular Revenue coming in especially by removing loot boxes which there's been a lot of pressure for uh so you know going to the free to play model will you know blizzard certainly has had a lot of success with free to play on a number of their titles uh though obviously also premium uh it's interesting to see them doing a kind of a combination and doing both well but to me it really sounds like it's it's more of an evolution of of the original game um they've they've learned a lot from it they realize that maintaining the original game um is probably just too much effort to be worth it they want to make more than regular Revenue stream um though I imagine the loot boxes were pretty regular so it's a little surprising that they got rid of it um but uh I guess they feel that they're going to get a really high conversion rate from their current players to the new ones and likely the business model is going to work out better for them yeah Matt you're you're a product

manager and um what do you what do you think about the same developers like Division and blizzard removing loot boxes and in one of their IPs but then also having recently released a very loot box heavy game of Diablo Immortal recently what do you make of it um I think they're kind of separate decisions um I I should first say like I played an unhealthy amount of OverWatch like I love OverWatch the first one and um I know that it had the the gotchas in it the loot boxes but um as a player I found them to be fairly forgiving um in the sense that like you can earn a lot of currency for free just by engaging with the game and maybe it's because I played so much of the game but I never had any issue getting the Cosmetics that I wanted um yeah I suppose the only time there would be a real pinch would be if there was like a Time limited uh set of cosmetics and you have to like get these

you know Halloween uh loot boxes or whatever something like that but um I I think it's an interesting business decision um and I think it's you know I think you mentioned this earlier it's sort of a reaction to the success or lack thereof of the original overwatch's business model um just kind of changing it around I I don't it's not clear to me like how how they're going to make a bunch of money are they just selling battle passes is that the is that the key thing here um because it seems skins yeah but it's like direct purchase skins is that right yeah it seems like not very directly spend depth um at first glance um I think when you when you talk about just gotcha generally speaking like you know if we're talking about like mobile games you mentioned Diablo Immortal of the top 100 mobile games probably like I don't know 90 Plus have

gotchas in them uh so it's a proven business model um I suspect they are doing this for a couple of reasons one being kind of public backlash to loot boxes they want this to be an esport they want this to be a big sort of free to play everyone can try and be the best type of competitive shooter and they they were already going that direction with OverWatch one right like they had a huge Esports push they had a number of free-to-play weekends when it became pretty evident that the player base was declining and they need to get people back into the game and interested in the the esport so I think um getting rid of loot boxes and just doing uh battle passes is one effort to kind of appeal to a broader audience and make it more like palatable to the general public I think um I think other go ahead foreign in agreements that I I read one analysis

that was saying without fortnite came along in since you know since OverWatch was initially released it changed a lot The monetization Meta of this these kind of games and that this is also a reaction to consumer Behavior that's changing so even um it's interesting to me that because it's entirely cosmetic like the whole Esports side of it like it seems like loot boxes wouldn't really affect it because it's not affecting your your gameplay ability um whereas for you know uh Diablo Immortal and others I think it you know it does affect your your power um but uh I mean you're right that the the depth of spend will be a lot lighter um but this I mean at some level really mimics what they had their success with with World of Warcraft like it's much more like a subscription model where you get lots and lots of people participating um you know with a declining user base like you said Matt like this is a great way to reinvigorate that and to get

every uh get a much much larger group going um which has positive effects around like even more people on Twitch and even more people in uh participating um also so I mean you're right Maria like the uh fortnite really kind of blue battle pass or I think it may originated it right um certainly made it the incredibly popular I was looking at some data recently and um I think in 2018 this was uh coming from a game Refinery uh the top 20 of games um in mobile games were about like 10 or 15 I think had battle pass in them now it's up to more like 50 or 60 so it's been much much more um there's been a lot more adoption over the past few years I know when we were working with apple apple was actively encouraging people to use the battle pass like it's it's something that they had seen a lot of success with and they probably similar to what you were saying that like it is something that feels a lot more

um palatable I guess but um it's interesting to me like it almost sounds worse from a competitive perspective if you're going to have um Heroes that aren't you know characters that aren't even available for probably a lot of the free-to-play players um so it'll be interesting to see how people react to that side of things well they they can be available if you invest and you progress I mean yeah okay it won't be available like now from the start all of the Care you get you get all the characters off of the bat and I thought it was an interesting comment I was reading the announcement that I had made and I think someone who was leading the project talked about I think they got a lot of backlash from players about locking um kept new characters behind progressing the battle pass and they said you know it's a business and what's the most attractive thing about the game is playing with a new character so it was just the obvious choice to design the battle pass around that makes sense I just in terms of the

Esports side um I mean yes you can unlock it but the people that paid for it are going to be practicing with it for weeks before everyone else is is able to even start using it um so yeah I mean I'm games are a business obviously we're all all right there um but if it's a if they're really trying to emphasize the Esports side of it it just surprises me a little bit to take something yes the characters are the most interesting thing to um you know the thing I'd be most likely to pay for for sure but uh yeah I I don't know from the kind of like the fairness perspective it's uh it surprised me a little bit it is it is coupled with the change that they're making to the competitiveness so how the the characters interact because OverWatch Prime and Matt you'll be able to confirm this because you played it a lot in OverWatch Prime there's almost a rock paper scissor element where someone brings a character there's a character that can counter it and it's more about

the characters and less about either skill involved but if you know what characters to pick and you have some skill you can you can gain an advantage and what they're doing um in OverWatch 2 is that they're making they're reducing the importance of what character you're bringing so it's more about skill and less rock paper scissors it just adds an edge of competitiveness so perhaps that and that will help mitigate how important new characters are I think you're your analysis is pretty correct it's been a while since I've followed the competitive scene there but I do remember they had this this meta where tanks were really important and it got to this point where the team it was just like a a slog where like teams were just like like unleashing all this damage on tanks and trying to reduce the HP of the other team's tanks so that they could get to the DPS and the healers and it was just

this grind and kind of like a tug of war where like things wouldn't go anywhere and just like it was kind of like not fun to watch or play uh in my opinion I don't know if they were able to correct that um in in recent years but that was a real problem they had and probably a big reason why they switched to the 5v5 over 6v6 so there could only be one tank you have such a good point there about not fun to watch so that could also be a massive boost for them not only is it free to play but um reducing the importance of the character choice and being more skilled the outcome is less predictable and so just be more fun to watch and OverWatch I believe invests quite a lot in like the competitive scene and so being able to get more viewership in terms of streams and then also participating in the Esports competitions I read I read in my when I was doing some research about the Dual building tanks where they have like Shields and yeah it didn't sound very fun

I I hope that they can Revitalize the Esports um and if you ever get a chance to um see it live like they do it in LA I don't know if they do it in the the respective Club cities where the other teams are based but they have a really good live presentation um at their studio um in Burbank and so it's it's a fun experience um and I hope that they can bring the Esports aspect back to life because it's really enjoyable to watch if you get a chance to go see it in person yeah I I was trying to think is this a good approach that would be useful to more Studios where instead of releasing a sequel and then you have to maintain the previous games plus the sequel with the cost of opportunity where you could have your full team working on the new game and improving that do you think um this is a strategy that we'll see more more Studios follow yeah it's um I think it depends a little bit on the situation which I mean I guess you

can always say but um for example I worked at imanji which is the Temple Run developers and Temple Run 1 and Temple Run 2 are both out they're both been around for a long time we were getting almost the same number of downloads in Temple Run 1 and stuff around two and so you know having trying to move people over get rid of that made no sense at all because that was a substantial part of our audience um you know I think it that may be an extreme case where like it built up a a brand and sort of like kind of kept rolling but uh you know they we had talked a few times about whether or not to try to transition all the Temple Run two one players into two um and uh you know and if if a sequel were done try to you know same question do we push everyone into a temple run three if that would happen and uh yeah we kind of felt like it it didn't make sense for us because so many of our downloads were coming for the first one um so I yeah in some cases it seems like make more sense but I was surprised when

I first started there I thought you know we should definitely be going all into the same app but it just did for us didn't make sense from the download perspective I suspect if you were to give the the folks at blizzard truth serum they would not say that this has gone particularly well I think like the time to have done this would have been two two years ago um because it's it's not like like they're kind of stuck in the middle right they like OverWatch is not like a top tier competitive shooter right now and OverWatch 2 is still not out yet um so if they really wanted to do this transition they should have had more of an overlap where they were ready to go with OverWatch too and who knows there could be a million reasons why they weren't ready you know it's it's a very high production quality game there's a lot of balance involved with the different Heroes and so I'm not making this I don't mean to make this sound like a trivial effort it's a huge effort um but the timing uh has not been great and so you know it's it's hard to draw

conclusions on whether this is a successful strategy that others should emulate um based on the results that we're seeing here because it's just not been performed under let's say ideal circumstances yeah I I agree with those views another example currently live in the market is for example Asphalt 8 asphalt 9. Asphalt 8 still performs amazingly well as has this Asphalt 9 and CSR when csr3 comes out I'm pretty sure they'll still keep csr2 um ongoing I remember I was just looking at the um steam top Revenue games in 2021 um and uh they have their Platinum tier that is top 12 and the gold or the next 12. and in the gold tier are both Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 5. um so there you go which is wild um and you know Madden and all the sports games are always doing that like they could just update their rosters and

everything but uh have found that that kind of repurchase model has worked really well at the same time you know live service games are maybe a bit of a different situation where you know World of Warcraft they have their expansions every once in a while but it's still they don't sell World of Warcraft 2 uh even if they had Diablo 1 Diablo 2 Diablo 3. so you know it might be that I guess that would be a question like I I know I mentioned Temple Run but it also was a premium game early on but you know what have there been many free to play games that have had good success doing um a sequel I guess like there was a Farmville too but I don't think I did particularly well like how many and I'm trying to think of big mobile games yeah free sequel that's a good point well I mean maybe maybe all right yeah genre dependent as you say like fighting

games maybe sports games racing games those you can do year over year but yeah free to like yeah I don't know I think uh for example um destiny I know it wasn't always free to play I think Destiny's a good example where and maybe World of Warcraft will encounter this at some point maybe Final Fantasy 14. so very long um live running games that and selling expansions premium expansions works up to the point where your Tech just starts hindering you so much where you need to start considering working on all the technical debt refactoring it's just not it's just not feasible and so just build a new a new game um and update well adjust you know with everything that it entails but that could be more cost effective um and effective strategy yeah sqls are kind of antithetical to the free to play model right like free to play you want to go as long as possible and maintain it as a service sequels you wanna do it

on a more frequent Cadence so you're getting that you know 60 box price every year or something like that all right yeah it's like games as a service like same for your software as a service like there's no Discord too right you know it's just Discord and they just keep developing right now um just one last one last point of analysis of OverWatch 2 is that uh it sounds like they changed their production processes to adapt to the new seasonal model and I wanted to dig into this a bit Matt with your your experience if we can talk about it because um at least from a mobile perspective this is very common you know a lot of mobile games have battle passes and you all you need to have almost three levels of timelines that you're always working towards you're doing very small surgical developments to you know you have something new to release for example live Ops every one two weeks and then you have maybe another part of the team

working on more midterm uh maybe features maybe a campaign something that's a bit meteor and then you have another part of the team or a different you know scrum team entirely that's developing like game changing like a new game mode um in RuneScape you know a new skill whatever it is and I don't it sounds like they did change their production processes to have teams working on the different seasons so that they have the capacity to develop multiple new characters at the same time not multiple new maps um does this this do you have this setup uh EA um I mean it's not really clear to me what their setup is exactly so it's hard to compare and contrast to be clear like I'm pretty sure that they were doing something like this for OverWatch one but it sounds like they really kind of refined it um to be more season based especially if they're leaning into the battle passes that makes a lot of sense they were definitely doing regular updates of bug

fixes and putting out new Heroes and new maps but it maybe it wasn't so predictable like season over season month over month whatever they decide to do for a season life um but um I mean it's it's not an easy thing to adjust to um you really have to build those muscles as an organization and you have to have the tooling to support it you have to get in a Cadence of regularly updating and cutting a build and sending it to QA and making sure everything is working smoothly on mobile you have the added like platform approvals you have to go through as well so there's a whole kind of pipeline that you have to establish and strengthen over time and through repetition and I guess it will remain to be seen how robust it is with OverWatch but you know clearly they have some experience at least on the mobile side doing this yeah it's just something that comes with time and you need to have people who have gone through it before it's not something you can just flip a switch and turn your studio to

live live service all of a sudden um so I think it remains to be seen how successful they will be they are they are signing themselves up for new character characters every however long the season is so it's like you know if you slipped by a few weeks with an update under a normal situation it's not as big a deal but here like they're gonna have I I really kind of feel sorry for their Dev team um crunches near the end of each of those Seasons that are going to be real rough so hopefully they don't have to go through that hopefully they can do it well but um those are some hard deadlines from unforgiving fans that are going to come out of that you can't always predict for a given like hero let's say you know you can't say oh it'll take us you know three weeks to make a hero like based on whatever kind of abilities they want to give that hero they may be more or less complex in terms of technical challenges in terms of balancing with the other Heroes it's it's difficult to predict exactly how long it will take to create

one hero uh or one map or you know what have you so um yeah yeah a lot can go wrong in Game Dev that should maybe be the the tag of Industry analysis yeah and I think they were very smart with their strategy of buying themselves time if they have to release something that's not pure you know finely balanced because they it's not in the competitive mode so it does give you a little bit of leeway before affecting the the game too significantly yeah I I agree by having their characters being the centerpiece of their seasonal passes they did leave the door open that they won't always release new characters every season and the first two seasons will have new characters but then they say but then it might be every every other season but it just leaves me with the question of how it might affect their revenue because if the character is the main driver to monitor to buy the premium if you don't

have that will you find something good enough to replace it in that motivation well we'll have to see yeah yeah hopefully they have you know five or six characters in the hopper as well that they've already developed and are just holding on to see like the more you can have stuff ready to Launch to kind of give yourself a little bit more flexibility as well in case something goes along that's a really good point as much as the audience would hate to hear that yeah yeah yeah of your content treadmill sounds like we need to set up a navic OverWatch team Matt is the leader no I'm it's been a while since I've played I'm not not very good um all right well we'll drive into the next topic which is the GTA leaks um I think this is with you Matt yeah so this was the big news of the past weekend um a uh a hacker managed to get into Rockstar's internal systems uh sounds

like it was perhaps through slack channels and they got access to a whole bunch of data something like 90 videos or three gigabytes of development footage and other other data from Grand Theft Auto 6 long rumored um I don't know if it had been officially confirmed prior to this leak but it certainly has been since then the league has been confirmed to be accurate is from the next Grand Theft Auto game uh this this is pretty massive right this game has been in development in some form or another according to Bloomberg since 2014. um and the previous title Grand Theft Auto 5 is still selling like crazy it's still like topping the charts which is incredible you know a massive achievement for that game um and so uh you know some of the things that are coming out here that had been previously rumored uh for the first time they're going to have a female protagonist in additional in addition to the male protagonist uh it's supposed to

be a sort of Bonnie and Clyde situation it's the way it's been described um takes place in a fictional Miami uh as you might know Vice City there was a previous game that took place there as well um so let's see statement from Rockstar Games uh quote work on the game will continue as planned at this time Rockstar Games does not anticipate any disruption to its current Services nor any long-term effect on its development timelines as a result of this incident we can talk about that in a little bit um just a quick note here on the hacker um so supposedly unverified this is the same hacker that infiltrated Uber last week and still a bunch of data from them this hacker I saw this on one article I haven't seen it in any other so I don't know if this is verified but there was they were trying to trying to to follow like the hackers footsteps where they claim that they downloaded this stuff from slack groups and they're trying to reach out to take two to like negotiate a deal I don't know what they had in mind there but it hasn't worked out well for them because their email address was

hacked they were doxed um and then all of a sudden their source code is not for sale anymore uh the hacker has disappeared all the footage that was getting uploaded to the internet has been taken down for copyright um I'm sure it's out there if you if you Google it you can find a bunch of it but um uh the hacker is now apparently this I found this out yesterday it's being investigated by the FBI uh and they're potentially uh being they're essentially a part of a larger hacker group called lapsis dollar sign lots of dollars and there was that had also previously hacked Microsoft and Nvidia and others earlier in the year so certainly bold moves from the hacker we'll see how that plays out for them um but the the big I think the big I don't know news or discussion point is like this is you know this is something that's been development for a long time I'm sure these developers are not happy to have their unfinished work with debug code and everything released

um for the general public to see um so you know for you too you're you've both worked in game development like have you ever had anything like this happen to you and even if not like how would you feel if your work was kind of leaked uh to the general public um there's been some backlash like you know some sort of unsympathetic fans who are like well you know Rockstar take two free to play Greedy blah blah but that's like publisher not the Frontline game developers who are having their like their hard work um revealed to everyone so anyways what do you guys think yeah so uh I can I can tell one story um about a company that I was with I will not name the company for the to protect the the innocent are guilty as it may be um so uh yeah we woke up one morning and um someone in the in the slack room that said uh you know one of we had a video

posted of an upcoming uh new feature that we were working on and we can't figure out you know where that came from and what happened where they got it from uh you know fortunately the video hadn't been watched a lot like this wasn't you know big Triple A game um but it definitely was very unsettling for everybody uh that you know it wasn't finished wasn't quite finished and um we were all trying to figure out like we had only seen that video in the slack and so you know how did they get into it what happened we started like kind of questioning everyone and um the community manager was getting ready to do some damage control and try to talk with everybody about it um and so we had like a good hour or two of sort of panicking um and then we found out that the one of the um leadership in the studio had intentionally leaked it but just hadn't told anyone so they had given this person some videos so that they would

you know start to distribute it um and so you know the good thing was the good news was there wasn't actually a hack there was no leak um but uh or no unimplant leak maybe uh but I certainly like got to see some of the panic that happens and that kind of feeling of you know where where did this come from you know are we safe is our information like the other stuff that we have to protect now um and uh and also kind of reinforced the uh you need to communicate with everyone if you're going to do something a little unusual so this manager um yeah it wasn't ideal so um you know fortunately it did not affect the game in a negative way and and maybe even had a positive effect which is always one of those you know at some level you kind of wonder sometimes if we I don't think this one was but some leaks are seem kind of suspiciously uh uh beneficial to the developer but um that's that's my story and that uh that category

I don't I don't have a story where this this happened um I think it is just part of the world now that this is this is a risk and even if you're a small company it's it's how people are learning to to make money and it's it's a business out of it so I think if I think processes have to change to protect against you know someone locking your data away and having the The Ransom to gain access to it when it's getting um for example the source code like what happened with with GTA if that if the forecast is on that could be rev you know Revenue breaking if it could really affect the game then um when I worked in fintech something that was really important is that the the Chief Information Security Officer

they were part of the um c-level Team so it's not like in some companies even really big companies where yes you do have a cyber security team they're more advisors rather than enforcers but if you have that role as this isn't just optional this is going to block your release we have to do these things we have to do um catastrophe catastrophe analysis and make out okay if this happens what are we going to do how do we protect our day how do we protect our source code so maybe this is a change we could see in the game industry where it's becoming so prevalent that cyber security will become a more I don't know how do I describe this just roll that can enforce change it's certainly in fintech that makes a lot of sense and um you know it'd be hard not to mention the the huge hacks in web 3 and blockchain crypto games um there's uh I mean hundreds of millions

of dollars like it's to the point where like I see a new article you know a new announcement of the hack and it's just like well that's that's what's what happens now that's just part for the course which is um not great that we're getting desensitized to that kind of thing but also just from a security perspective like you know if this was in on their slack um you know that may have been a slack uh security hole but more likely I would bet it's just you know old-fashioned social engineering someone tricks someone into getting a password and then they logged in and got it like and there's there's only so much you can do for that I've I've seen very very intelligent people get tricked by that kind of thing before um so uh yeah it's you it's certainly good to have good practices in there but you know we're all human too and and things like that will happen unfortunately yeah that's true I don't know how how much companies invest in pen testing as well at least that was something that exists widespread and fintech I do do game companies actually pay someone to

do their best to try to hack the company is I'm not familiar with it yeah it's like penetration testing is where you authorize someone to do their best to try to do bad things um sorry Matt you were saying yeah no I think you you both made um some of the points that I was going to raise which is like it's probably not really a security vulnerability so much as a social engineering exploit um uh it's your question Maria I think probably some companies do I know you know we certainly have anti-cheat uh folks within the organization however it's probably limited to organizations of a certain size I would guess I I would assume take two Rockstar has security and anti-cheat folks as well but there's only so much you can do um when it's you know someone makes a human error um uh as you say I think this is this is kind of a reality of game development uh these days

um you know just just a couple days afterwards Diablo 4 had a similar thing happen where some of their footage was posted anonymously online I think it happened to Tekken earlier in the year Tekken six um I read something about how the entire multiversis roster of characters was released well ahead of time so so perhaps there's something to discuss here around like proactively planning for communications and PR around these things with the assumption that perhaps some of the key details might leak um and uh there's also another point to be made that like there are different types of hacks quote unquote um so if they truly got the source code which I don't know that that's been necessarily confirmed the hacker says that they have it um that's a pretty big deal and may lead to consequences as it relates to cheats or mods or something like that but it was just gameplay footage that's a little bit different or it's like details around the story or the

characters that are in the game like I think that's a little bit easier to damage control quote unquote um there's also at least on the mobile side I don't know how prevalent it is on PC console um data mining so someone gets a hold of a beta build or an early release and they unpack it and there are looking through the code to see what's in there I've had that happen to games that I'm working on sometimes it's accurate and sometimes it's not and so you know you as a I don't know consumer of this uh Rumor Mill you kind of take it at face value um so uh I'm not really sure what the point I'm trying to make is here here is but there's like there's a scale here I guess of severity and there's only so much you can do as a developer um to get out in front of this yeah I think well probably what you're saying there is or part of what you're saying is I think a really good point which is that you know things like

um videos and story and things that would be in a a slack Channel or something are not nearly as damaging as code and so you know Maria's point about having really strong information security around the things that matter like source code um I think is very prudent uh it makes a lot of sense but also just sort of like some level of just kind of accepting that some of the lighter stuff like screenshots May slip out and you know maybe even prepping everyone that you know it's it's not the end of the world there's no need to panic it's it's not going to ruin anything I mean they said uh they're continuing on Raw Stars not making any changes like it's it's not breaking anything it's okay so as long as you're more careful with the things that really would matter um and then just take sort of a sort of a Zen like it'll be all right if something goes wrong hopefully it doesn't um you know I think that'll help you get through most of it I think there might also have been a bit of a morale hit um at least I saw some comments that

weren't very kind to the game but it's it's not done it's in progress without being reasonable and not go straight into the attack especially on online social media that that doesn't happen it's very instinctive of how some of these comments are made or at least I hope that that's the justification for it um so even if it's something that's minor um it could still have an impact on the on the morale of the team where I don't know it's been in depth since 2014 who spent eight years working on something and then it gets released before it's it's ready for an audience and you hear um a lot of negative comments I I can imagine that might have some some toll and um I remember that CD project red actually was hacked earlier this year and the source code of gwent The Witcher 3 and cyberpunk was was hacked and I think it was even it was auction on the dark web or

something and there was an article in June saying that's now circulating their source code is circulating and they've managed to get access to it and selling encryption keys and whatnot so that that will be a real example of what does it what does getting your source code um given to the world well what are the consequences of it I don't know how much how many details we'll get um that's yeah that's a recent example and by the way this game is not set to release for at least another couple of years either um right it's still a ways out I think um so I think Rockstar will be okay I think the hype will still be massive for this title I think it will still perform incredibly well like if it's anything like their previous titles whether it's GTA 5 or Red Dead Redemption like these are amazing games uh with Incredible uh tools and Tech behind them and um I think they'll be okay but for yeah as

you say for the front line developers is certainly demoralizing to have your half-baked work released to the public and criticized by uh people who often know nothing about game development and are quick to be harsh with their judgment so it's certainly disappointing from that perspective well then we can get um with this hook well I'm just going to explain in it um yeah we'll go into Anthony's risk and game design I was going to be mean and say but then some games could just take it away but that's not good because it's meant to be fun so yeah throw that Segway out the window um kill Anthony sure um yeah this is sort of a theory I've been working on for a while um looking at media you know both games but also outside of games and just sort of Trends in audience um preferences and where they're being kind of drawn and I think it probably first started with Game of Thrones

um and I won't no I won't give any spoilers or anything in case anyone hasn't hasn't finished it or probably showed up by now but oh well um the uh one of the things that I think was so compelling about it is that they were absolutely willing to kill off anyone and so anytime there was a battle like when you're watching a Marvel movie or something like you know the hero is going to be okay like it's just that's not how those movies work but in Game of Thrones when there was a battle your favorite character might not make it out and that made every one of those so much more compelling because there was this sense of risk of the potential for loss and you know I I you know felt much more of a like you know my heartbeat going anytime there was a battle with someone I cared about because I didn't know where that was going to go um and I think you know I'm sure some other shows have done it before but I think they did it really well and and it was really effective um and then we've had things like uh Dark Souls and all the souls like games that a lot of people say are really hard and I don't think it's I mean there are

certainly hard parts of it but I think it's more about the fact that you you know you have long times between your saves and if you make a mistake like you can methodically go through it but it's punishing if you do something wrong far into it you can go way way way back and lose like a couple hours of progress and that makes everything you do in the game that much more tense because you have some sense of of loss that can come from it uh and then I was looking at some other games I'm a little behind the time so I just now have heard of escape from tarkov but for those of you who aren't as familiar with it um it's a pvpve it's basically um kind of a battle royale game over a long term so there's a bunch of different players who are trying to have each other own objectives so you're not like competing for something it's not PVP in that you're not generally getting points for killing each other um sometimes you might have an objective like you have to shoot some guy in the left leg or something but generally not

uh but you can also kill someone at any point in time and when you do they lose all of their progress all of their equipment that they had is just dropped and anyone else can pick it up and so it's you know a tremendous sense of loss um I saw a reviewer who was talking about how in most games when you you know take out an opponent you're just sort of like minorly inconveniencing them and in tarkov like you're really like I mean what he says like you kill people um like you'll never see that player again that's they've lost a whole bunch of stuff um and uh and it makes for I mean it's in the top 25 games on Twitch it makes for very very compelling um uh you know viewing uh it's sort of a big prisoner's dilemma thing like you know everyone could just run around and just get their stuff done and everyone would be happy but you know if you do if you try to do that and the other person's not then you lose and they win um so it's it's this giant kind of like experiment in that uh and there are a

couple other games I think um this one called hunt that's a similar kind of genre and we'll probably continue seeing this sort of evolution of Battle Royale uh and then looking at like the crypto side um crypto raters is a game that a while ago announced that they were going to have permadeath and in March they had their first uh tournament where there were 64 players that each had their own nfts coming into it and anytime an nft one of those died they burned the nft and so 63 of those nfts were burned and there was one like big winner who got all sorts of stuff but people were losing things that were worth a significant amount of money um going into it and uh you know again it makes for really compelling and really exciting kind of drama as a streamer and as a viewer um you know we're starting we see roguelikes which have obviously been kicking up a lot um I've been gaining popularity for years and years but uh continuing to see and this is I think one of the angles I'm curious about is like you know where can you introduce risk into other genres um slate Aspire and ccgs we've got like

Binding of Isaac and Survivor survivor.io and arcade Shooters 3D action had been like 902 Alden ring obviously we've got the first person shooter battle royale's the uh you know hack and slash games like Hades there's even a tower defense um roguelike called Tower tactics Liberation that I've gotten into recently so I'm I guess that's kind of my first couple of questions are you know have do you agree that this is a trend and if so do you think there's directions that we can go as game designers or um to maybe explore that and give players a little more tension and excitement in in games oh I don't know I don't know I'm not sure if it's a trend uh or I I tend to take the view that this is kind of like um I mean maybe it's both it's sort of like a fundamental bias or like part of human nature to like value what you have and it's called like loss aversion right like um if you have it you're going to feel

much more um concerned or anxiety about losing it versus like the potential to gain some equivalent amount it's like your excitement for that is less I'm doing a poor job of explaining loss aversion but that's that's kind of the idea um and you could even um maybe extend this thought to go to like puzzle games where you know I have 30 moves to complete this round and I get to move 29 and I'm not going to do it and uh then I get the pinch spend 30 currency to get five more moves or whatever the case may be so um you can I think you can um extend this thought to all sorts of games um one thought I had as I was thinking through this we were discussing this on slack before the for the episode was um perhaps this is something where games and media are becoming more fragmented

and Niche towards specific audiences so there are some audiences Game of Thrones fans Elden ring fans that have a higher tolerance or higher uh excitement around the risk and the potential to you know lose all the progress you've made and there are other audiences say in more casual genres or different types of media that are less open to that they want a more comfortable Lean Back experience and maybe this is just there's more content and media out there today than there was however many years ago and there are more there's a broader spectrum of experiences in that loss aversion category let's say yeah I think it's funding new new markets in a way because we have the traditional personas and I think we've seen a trend where um game studios instead of trying to satisfy have a game that has everything you select a Persona and then you really

dig into the core of what motivates them so I think these law risk where you put it all on the line and hope that your skill is enough to get you through it I think it's just leading into like the killer Persona um you're competitive but now you're even more competitive where you can lose it all um so yeah I think it's just targeting it's targeting a market because I I do believe that having a game like that you might have uh you might Target a smaller audience but then get an audience as more deeply engaged and will monetize more in that kind of game and then you might have um more success in Esports and streaming because it's exciting and then another example that comes to mind is for example the the Explorers I think that's what it's called which is people that like to explore the world and discover discover Treasures I think that's what

um Sky children's of light on mobile is really tapping into because it doesn't have too much action you just you lean you lean back like Matt said you explore the world you'll find all of these treasures and it's more it's all about the the journey and I think we'll see yeah some some game studios tapping into that more that's a good point um I I think Anthony you also raised a good point around um crypto nft games um because the financialization adds another aspect of potential loss and potential risk right it's like you're just if it's if it's a game it's yeah you've lost a lot of time and perhaps you've invested in some of the in-game items like Eve online comes to mind for example there's a lot of money that's been lost in uh destroyed spaceships there but um in crypto games it's the entire thing is financialized uh and so just it's like built in that that loss aversion

that risk is just so inherent to the gameplay um so yeah maybe it's just like a new dimension there yeah um you know in terms of like trying to I mean it reminds me a little bit of like almost going back to watching the Coliseum or something like can we get back to the more and more risk and the more kind of like loss that you can come from it seems to it really does sort of trigger a sort of a an entertainment kind of side to things to viewers at least um but I also kind of Wonder like especially with nfts and with high value things like is there any sort of a um a moral obligation as game developer to not um provide situations that you know even in there have been stories about uh you know like Call of Duty players who have like swatted each other and you know just because they get angry over losing a match or something like if we start upping the stakes more and more and I've seen other nft games talk about losing

nfts to each other and um I I don't know like it's it was it made me kind of take pause and wonder if um a game with that design is creating a situation that might lead to um some sort of escalation or is that just outside of the realm of anything that you know game designers really should be worried about I think not only is the PFT does not have a legal a difference from something that's not an nft I'm assuming this so maybe that consideration is more like any kind of game where a player can put to stake and lose a significant investment I don't know if if the minimum entry price of something you can take into this game mode costs uh 100 dollars is it is it okay to allow the majority of the players who enter that round to lose 100 each and then that's that's poker I guess poker is

um regulated I I think you're you're on something there there's definitely a moral and ethical obligation to communicate the risk of loss to your players I don't know the designers should necessarily concern themselves with like what might happen when someone takes it to to an extreme maybe there's you know maybe we sort of think through the edge cases and and put some guard rails in place I think that is totally fair um I think there are there are other ways to um make it a little bit um make the loss a little bit more palatable or less painful so an example that comes to mind and I'm sure we'll see this with nfts at some point in the future is like you can in these extraction Shooters you can sometimes buy with soft currency or hard currency Insurance on your items um so like you know in the event that you get killed and you lose all your stuff well you'll get some small percentage of of the value back or you'll get the items back or something

um these extraction shooters by the way are coming to mobile and that's definitely something you can do there as a PM like that's a huge monetization sync in my mind um so definitely like selling insurance is gonna be a thing and if that's um I'm sure that someone will some company or service will pop up in crypto gaming to ensure nfts that have potential loss in uh crypto games and if you lose your nft character or whatever and it gets burned like you'll get some percentage of it back in eth or whatever yeah well that's for example what RuneScape does or MMOs you could have the PVP area so RuneScape has the Wilderness where you go and do PVP if you lose um anyone can take whatever's on on your character but then you can buy more Bank slots so that you can keep more at your bank and carry less danger with you I think that was such a good idea Matt about the insurance and this is what I love about you know blockchain coming in and giving even more game design

possibilities to what exists nowadays and is seeing this merge of just things that exist in the real world coming into the game like Insurance you know we did that in shipping times when we had the first the first boats exploring exploring the world so I can imagine I don't know you might have a blockchain game where someone can take on a role of an insurer where you you can create your own little business where you might accept you might take the risk of the loss to for the the price you get for the premiums who who knows um never has gaming been so exciting as when it entered the insurance world give me actuaries I I got excited I do want to call that one game um that was just sort of a fun experiment uh that someone ran years ago so Flash game um that was on congregate.com called you you only live once and it was a like you

were jumping across the top of um buildings you had a time to get across but the game would you once you've lost once it would write a cookie to your your computer and you could not play the game again like you literally got one life and so like you would kind of really you know anytime you get into the back you like kind of back up like I'm gonna get this one I'm gonna get this one and it would show you like what percentage of people died on each jump um and you could go in and delete the cookie and everything but the the concept was really interesting of just literally giving you one life to see how far you can get wow this is how non-tech Savvy I am I was thinking oh I could just travel all the libraries and go to all the computers and play it when I just delete my cookie um but I think another another reason why we might see this this risk um this risk type of game design happening more and more in blockchain games is I'm not going to mention play to earn I'm not mentioning play to earn

but a big aspect about the game economy is um having scarcity so features that sync and then you create scarcity and then that changes the marketplace value of the different things because that can call that can create a whole meta of itself so I can see things where this is a good way to burn nfts so imagine you I don't know you meant there's a limited edition um flower that you mince 200 of them and then enough people bring that flower and it gets burned well then it will increase in price because there's less of them there so it can create something special out of it I say flower because I didn't want to say gun but that sounded really cheesy it's a game where you go and give flowers to other people sorry Anthony it's definitely happened I've talked about it before um there's a game that a quote-unquote

game that took place called chain faces Arena where you had uh you had you got an nft and you submitted to the arena and either you pull it out at some point to get your share of the prize pool or it dies quote-unquote gets burned in the arena or it's the last one standing and wins the the full prize pool but there are all these market dynamics uh around you know let's say nfts that never entered the arena or when you put it into the arena and then pull it out after some number of rounds it gets like a visual scarring and so that like changes the appearance of it there are also different like traits that have different Rarities so so like what how will the market value a nft that when is the arena for 100 rounds was pulled out has all these scars on it has different You Know Rarity tiers around its existing traits but um you know it never won be like real prize like how does that how does the market value that I don't know but it's an interesting Dynamic it gets created

because a bunch of them were burned in the arena so the overall supply has gone down and there are only so many that have this many scars and this many Rarity traits so I don't know it's like interesting market dynamics that form around those things that's cool and if you have a really awesome animation where it shows you the pain it burns in front of you that could be also interesting from a streaming perspective where I it just really goes again we're going into those player personas you really dig deep into the Persona um to generate all of these uh having stronger emotions I mean as popular as like just watching people open gotcha's like expensive Gauchos like I spent a hundred dollars on this let's see what comes out of it uh is a really popular thing on Twitch um and uh yeah and some kind of similar like you have at that point lost 100 and you might get something back like it's sort of in the other direction but um yeah creating like kind of big dramatic endings and little mini

funerals maybe or you know anything that can like really can take advantage of how fun it is to watch people put it all on the line and see what happens yeah I'm super pumped to go make a game okay I think we'll well a lot of topics that was that was really fun um yeah if you want to add something to discussion you can find us on the navic Discord you have the joining Link in the show notes and thanks Matt and Anthony for joining today enjoy your sun Matt not salty about it and we'll see you again next week thanks everyone bye foreign [Music]