Shaping the Metaverse Brick by LEGO Brick - The Metacast by Naavik

we're talking about american english versus english english if it's lego and not legos shouldn't it be math and not maths [Music] hello friends welcome to the metacast by navic the round table episode and today i'm joined by david aymour ceo of playmint and matt diane senior product manager at ea hey hello hello i need some more enthusiasm that wasn't enough never never enough it's early morning here in los angeles still waking up

yeah it's been it's been a tough week i hope everyone is good and having fun and is enjoying spring coming about in the uk we actually have an extended weekend a four day a four day weekend so i don't know how is it going with you david but just feels like everyone's trying to cram in all of the meetings except to get things done i was at gdc and then i had a week in the caribbean as i think you know and then i'm back for a couple of weeks then i'm up at devconnect in amsterdam so i'm trying to squeeze a lot in a very short amount of time i forgot about the long bank holiday weekend so yeah that's uh squeezed everything yes sorry matt you're not on this weekend uh it's okay um it's already quite warm here in los angeles for the most part it was like almost 100 fahrenheit a few few days ago so what is fahrenheit what does that mean i'm just just specifying for you uh folks in the uk um

all right well today we're going to be talking about ubisoft ending the active development of ghost recon breakpoint which was surprising news maybe not surprising to very knowledgeable people out there that can foresee the future as to why ubisoft took the chance of introducing nfts into one of their live games and we're also discussing epic's raise of 2 billion a big number and their collaboration with lego and also mini miniclip pivoting away from web browser games we spoke about miniclip exceeding 4 million downloads and yeah it was very interesting to see this news follow up quickly from their their milestone so we'll dig into that and [Music] i don't know are you still not keen on showing your excitement for these topics i'm just i'm ready for us to play into the first topic i got all sorts of thoughts i think i think the epic lego

news is is really big it's two billion dollars i mean i'm we're getting ahead of ourselves i guess but i can't wait to talk about that so i'm just reserving my enthusiasm maria don't miss you know sorry sorry we're on youtube now they can see our enthusiasm in our faces even if we're not you know i'm just saying i'm just waiting for the starting pistol that's all that's happening oh uh matt i hear you quite in low volume actually we're resolving technical issues live this is this is good topic um i don't know if you can get your microphone is this any better it's a little bit better yeah yeah oh keep going i'll play with it uh so yeah before we dive into the first topic about ubisoft i want to give a huge congrats to returno for winning the best game bafta award and also doing a shout out to forza horizon 5 for winning the best british game award and unpacking for the ee game of the year award that's voted by the

public i was thinking i was thinking about return and house mark and how how they've been around forever and just gradually got better and better and uh to the point you know they were doing quite small games back in the 90s well i guess everyone was but now really building up to something that wins game of the year at bafta i think is super cool and part of sony now as of last year right so you know i think that they sometimes thinking about superstardust which i think was one of their games that that sony would use to try and eke out the new features of their hardware as it was on playstation 4. it feels like they're doing something similar with playstation 5 and they just nailed it so good for that team have you guys played unpacking have you tried that one no no it's on my list actually it looks like the sort of game meditative game that i play yeah it's it's delightful it's like really really simple and um you know conservative and what it's trying to

accomplish but it's a it's a fun little experience and like really as you said it's like a cozy game you know really relaxing what platforms what platforms are those uh we played it on game pass xbox game pass ah good old game pass well what makes it so delightful i mean uh the whole premise of the game is that you're moving like you're unpacking boxes and moving into a new apartment or room and they sort of do a bit of story exposition through the room that you're unpacking and so you have different things that you take out and then you move through the character's life into different rooms and you see how some of the items change you see like um mementos from their partner and how those change over time and you just get little hints at their story but it's not full-blown exposition but the actual sort of tasks that you're doing just moving things around rotating them

getting them into the perfect place it's just very simple and straightforward and like you could just kind of turn your brain off it's got a gorgeous art style and also i think that one of the attributes one of the things that people attribute to the success of tetris and candy crush is it's people like making order out of chaos and there's something that feels really good it's like tidying your house feels good once you've done it it feels good yeah and i think it sort of taps into that a little bit definitely interesting it does feel like i do some deep introspection about life and philosophy yeah i don't know yeah that definitely sounds definitely sounds something i'd like to play try it out try it out yeah yeah i i'm sorry i was gonna say the fourth uh the third one with uh forza 5 by playground is that what did that win uh best british game okay yeah that

looks excellent that's one of the games where when i see youtube videos of people playing that it's unclear if it's uh real life or not yeah it's that close to me at least it's really impressive and i love the art style as well the bright colors yeah well it's returnable that's going to make me subscribe to the new playstation pl plus tiers after having churned for about two years um yeah really looking forward to it yeah good games i'm sure i'm going to be awful at it but matt you mentioned that you wanted to uh brag about your elden ring no there's no progression there's no bragging i was just saying we could riff on elder ring now that i'm i'm 80 hours into it or something um it's a great game that's the flex it's not 80 hours in it's no flex it's it's really like nothing to brag about this is just what i'm doing after work dive into elden ring i'm still stuck with a prisoner on the first boss

i'm actually having a friend come over on the weekend so that he can pass the enemy for me um have you tried like summoning uh another player to help you out i don't have friends no no no you don't have to have like friends in the game they're just random people oh no yeah yeah okay well here okay here's the thing about about eldon ring and from software they don't they don't explain anything to you even like how to play multiplayer um so don't be afraid to google things i do this all the time um but there's a way that you can summon other players into your game to help you with a boss battle you don't have to be connected on any social service you don't have to actually be like okay add this friend it's just anyone um and similarly you can you can help other people by putting your they call it a summon sign you put it on the ground anyone else can summon you into their game and

it's like no risk for you you get to sort of preview the boss before you get to them and if you die you don't lose anything uh but if you win you like help the other person and you get some amount of runes and like it's it's basically like a it's a no-loss scenario for you to help out other players i had no idea about this okay it changes the game yeah okay i know what i'm doing later on all right no more elden ring talk no more shame about my progression i was hoping monu would be here so i know but it's okay he was going to join us but unfortunately he's a bit under the weather so we'll have to save our npc battle jokes for another time but we're thinking about you money okay so ubisoft they ended their active development of ghost recon break point and i think the game has always somewhat struggled with negative reception from launch i think the team was very hard trying to

improve it and doing updates and just trying to change things around but i think they never were able to overcome the negative reception and then ubisoft decided to try their courts uh their digits i think that's how they call their their nfts and now they've announced that they're stopping updates like they're going to continue maintaining the the servers so people can continue playing what i know matt what do you think do you think it was all planned they knew they were going to sunset the game at some point and so the risks seem worth it to try nfts uh maybe i mean i imagine um a title of that size and a company of that size they're doing planning that far in advance um they may not have known the exact date or quarter that they were going to sunset it but they had to have seen the financial results and the player counts and you know had some indication that it was going well or not well i think that's probably one of the reasons they chose that game to test out nfts was because it was a low-risk

proposition for them is not a huge title in their portfolio and they felt like maybe they could get away with it and i think if you look at the numbers i don't have them offhand but it was like less than 100 nfts were were sold or acquired by players so not exactly mass adoption um so i can kind of understand why ubisoft did it in this title um and to answer your question i think they had to have known at least partially this is gonna happen how long have the game been out i mean when did the game come out october 2019 oh okay so it's uh so it was sort of as you say matt maybe it felt like it was kind of on its way out already and they were trying something out with nfts in that i mean i don't think it's the nfts that sank it particularly i think it's just a game that was on its way out and like a lot of games are on their way out there at some point they decide that you're gonna not gonna continue to live

operating you just leave the service on for a while until people stop showing up or something speaking from experience and granted my experience comes from the mobile side of the business but sometimes if you're working on a game that is not sort of the jewel of the portfolio it's somewhere in the middle maybe it's going to be sunset that's a great place for a company to try new things to try and innovate so if you have some sort of internal it doesn't even have to be nfts you have some sort of internal initiative maybe you want to do something risky with data science or try some crazy new game design or you know whatever the case may be a game like that that isn't that you're not hanging your financial results on uh necessarily as an entire company that's a great place to just try something out and see if it works um so you know we can sort of debate the the merits of how they approached nfts but just the idea of testing it in one of their games this is probably the type of game that you would want to try it out in right like low stakes you don't expect it to necessarily take

off but if it does that's great well and also you would think they learned a lot from this yeah i would hope so yeah i mean it uh it didn't go well but as you said it not going well in a game that's on its way out anyway is a great place to learn that stuff if you think if you think this is going to be important in the future so i'm sure there's tons of learnings there and the next time they do this in another game there's no talk of them not doing it right they're they're still pursuing that course i'm sure i think i would think that the next time they do something like this it will be better executed i still admire them as a company for for trying something i think they got a lot right but the message you know the implementation was pretty good but the messaging was maybe not there don't know yeah i know a hatch is similar we use a past title to run experiences for example with new tech so i know it happens quite a lot in mobile i didn't have this notion that such triple a

companies also did that with the titles are going to be sunset um maybe only only started to pay attention now with that kind of detail in in game dev really but i don't know there was something about me that felt quite impressed knowing that oh this was actually calculated in terms of doing this experimentation and then if it doesn't work out that's fine because the game is going to be sunset anyway yeah yeah they they mitigated that risk by trying some new stuff out in a game that was losing its players anyway by the sounds of things one thing that i do left me wondering though is so the players that have the digits i think the ditches haven't been sold that much on marketplaces i think i did see it but it was like two and a half thousand dollars worth i mean tiny tiny tiny yeah so what does it what does it mean do you think david that we're going to see players being able to get a benefit if they own these digits from break point maybe in a

future ubisoft game that will give them something with those 100 people that bought it such a tiny amount of people but i mean i think uh that certainly if i was ubisoft then if maybe for pr apart from anything else you would say okay if you if you bought if you're one of those hundred people that bought the nft in in breakpoint then sure you get to use it in this next game in this way it gives you some kind of booster pack or something that uh ought to be fairly easy and sort of demonstrate the way that uh digital ownership works uh i would i would think so i would hope so although truthfully it's such a small volume of people that it's you know a speck in the scheme of things it's more of a pr thing probably than a functional thing yeah i was thinking you know we've seen um we've seen zynga i believe they partnered with forte for forte to do the development of web3 games and was it crafton um that partnered with solana yeah

recently okay so do you do you think that this might be the path ubisoft goes down i know they've they've been doing investments in web3 gaming companies do you think they'll partner for a company external to ubisoft to do the web 3 development like we've seen other companies do um excuse me i'm not sure um i i suppose that's one possibility uh if i remember correctly this initiative was done on tazos which was meant to be sort of an environmentally friendly blockchain and that was one of the reasons why they chose it um because they were expecting that backlash i can't say that i've heard of a number of gaming partnerships happening with tazos that just might be that i haven't been exposed to it but i haven't heard any big news about that um you know it's it it's possible they continued down that path maybe they felt this didn't go so well so we'll explore some other alternatives

but generally speaking i kind of get the sense that companies like ubisoft like take two you know activision the big big publishers are gonna wait for someone else to figure it out first and then they'll follow in the steps of the smaller companies that are being a little bit more aggressive yeah that's uh that's probably correct um i'd say a couple of things to be clear i mean uh you said that the the zinger are leaning on forte to do the web 3 development to be clear you know forte offer is a suite of tools like like game developers might use unity in order to make a 3d game um from forte offer a set of technology they help you with mining nfts and marketplaces and all that kind of stuff so it's really just a set of tools that a game maker can use to add blockchain functionality to their game uh which which is how that stuff works they're not actually building forte best i know don't actually build any games oh interesting i thought

i'm probably misunderstood then i i thought zynga was working with forte to essentially do x-dev of the games but i probably i'm not in the space so i don't trust my own training they've raised a lot of money so that's they could do that but i think that's they're using that money or at least part of it to incentivize game makers to use this their blockchain and their set of tools i think that them and tezos and others um mythical etc are are trying to uh giving grants to encourage developers to use their tools and their blockchains so that so that they become the de facto game blockchain sort of race on between four or five different blockchains to try and make them sells the de facto uh blockchain in the same way as unity and unreal try and make themselves the de facto engine right yeah out of curiosity yeah david you're the ceo of a company that's

developing web3 games do you feel any kind of pressure or all eyes on you from [Music] the big dogs of the industry i love this term um just watching just watching what you're doing and do you ever feel the pressure of defining a space and trying to find success that will eventually be replicated by bigger companies uh i don't feel the pressure i feel it's uh i'm incentivized to do it because my intention is to try and establish that what what is the frame of resonance that you know zynga take two all of these companies are going to be looking for what is a web 3 game and in in a sense there's a race between all the smaller companies like ours to try and figure out what that is so that we do become the frame of reference for people uh building web3 games in the future just as i used candy crush as an example when i was building a free-to-play mobile company i could say that's how you do it look they're making all that

money and players love it and you know millions of players so i think i don't feel pressured to do that i mean that's a obviously a corporate goal to try and figure that out ahead of other people uh but it it's a if it's pressure then it's positive pressure interesting thanks for sharing and the other thing i was going to say just uh something matt said about tezos i don't think you would say that uh the success of ubisoft's games on the blockchain had anything to do with the chain that they were using so i didn't think there was i don't think any part of tezos malfunctioned or i think it did exactly what it was supposed to do so yeah if there were mistakes then one of them wouldn't have been to use tezos in my mind well yeah i wasn't going so much for the technology itself but rather the the community around it um oh you know i'm agreeing with you i think that um that tezos was actually a pretty smart choice for them i think uh partly

because it's you know it's a proof-of-stake chain so they don't have the environmental concern so there's other things i think that cause a problem sure for sure i was looking into tessa's and it seems that the marketplaces they integrate with or not the most popular ones so i do wonder if maybe that's a competitive choice as well i don't i don't know enough i don't know did ubisoft integrate their own marketplaces i don't recall exactly how they implemented it no we could go down a rabbit hole talking about bridges and marketplaces and liquidity pools but i think we need niko for that i was just about to say this is going into nico's crypto corner so we'll do a quick segue into a happy topic that's not web free which is epics raise of 2 billion and a lego collaboration well not really a segue from y3 because it's to build a metaverse meta versus web 3 is it it is okay well we'll dive into that

yes so i i thought it was really funny to see the race being announced i was thinking that i was going to do an excellent pun about how much of an epic race this was then i was going through social media and i saw so many people using the pun [Laughter] well now i'm just referencing it and not actually making it so i i thought this is really interesting because i found if there's someone out there like these moguls of entertainment that know how to craft products that attract children uh young teens and also adults like parents being able to play a game or interact with a a product that they can build with their children epic and lego it just feels right there's something about it that makes me really excited to see what what they're going to develop and they didn't share too many details but they did share that a fundamental pillar of the metaverse

they're going to build is going to be protecting the well-being of children and personally that's something i've been a little bit concerned about with the concept of the metaverse because you're you're increasing the contact points without supervision between you know children and anonymous users on on the internet so yeah knowing that there's someone out there that is definitely building with the well-being of children in mind and i kind of trust epic and lego to do that just because of the products that they already have yeah it's an incredible partnership i mean for both parties you've got uh lego who you know they're this i mean i love lego every who doesn't love lego but um nonetheless they're a toy company making plastic toys in a time when things are going increasingly digital i think probably lego kick themselves for not having invented minecraft you know that's it's lego in a game in in a sense and that could have been theirs that would have been the digital transition that

they probably would have hoped for but that wasn't them right and and then subsequently you see roblox and and it feels like the digital space for kids is getting away from lego and so they need to make a bold move and partner with somebody that can really make the digital transition they've i mean they have some great lego games but they're sort of you know they're not a substitute for lego they're just a a good implementation of a lego game if you see what i mean and then from epic's point of view you can see that minecraft and roblox work where you could lego is the brand that fits perfectly with apps and it's uh so well trusted lego like so you'd imagine that parents would be happy to have their kids join in lego space uh adults will still be comfortable in a lego world you know because it it feels comfortable reminds them of their childhood um so i think uh i'll come on to the money in a minute but what an amazing partnership what a great deal

yeah um you took the words right out of my mouth david i like i think it it makes a lot of sense for both parties um when you think about the sort of target audience of um fortnite and their competition against minecraft against roblox as you mentioned i think minecraft and roblox tend to skew a little bit younger certainly roblox does and you know to the point around safety for children that's something that roblox has traditionally hung their hat on is that they have all these tools and systems in place to protect children um so yeah you know it makes a lot of sense to try and compete in that demographic uh for epic and lego is a a perfect brand to do that and um it's it's um it's a natural fit for the whole idea of ugc and creators and um looping those that audience into your ecosystem you know fortnite already

has a creator mode you stack the legos on top of it like it makes a lot of sense yeah yeah lego not legos though just to excuse me i noticed that maria did the same thing using but lego is it not lego this one is a multiple lego is it lego pieces it depends what side the atlantic you are but it's you know i'm on your side of the atlantic david well then you're the one in the world i am trying to make my english more british clearly failing at this sorry sorry that was made of me that's okay but no i ain't no offense taken i i really like the comparison with with roblox and i think that the partnership with lego is a competitive advantage for epic because people who are not very familiar with gaming are familiar with lego my mom doesn't know anything about games but she knows lego because i used to ask her all the time to buy me some and maybe that will help with if if

parents who are not very aware of the gaming worlds by their children asking if they can join the lego metaverse maybe parents know the brand and will feel more comfortable in allowing them and perhaps even because they're used to paying for lego in real life maybe the barrier to spend will also be lower if you're spending lego for your children online it's a trusted brand and you spend more money with a trusted brand if you if you think that epic who want to build the metaverse that's sort of their north star that's everything lines up to that have i guess three choices you either evolve from your either uh evolve fortnight and but that has limit you know already that's culturally a certain thing it's the sort of thing you associate with 20 year old 30 year old boys or something i don't know but you know it's certainly culturally one thing it's maybe a bit of a push to expect that to extend to be the metaverse even though

it's hugely popular and then they have another decision which was we can start something brand new but that's hard you know it's hard to build an ip even with infinite resources uh oh the third thing is you can sort of stand on the shoulders of giants so lego is what an amazing starting point to do that so it feels like a a smart move that feels lego feels like a much better fit for the metaverse than fortnite for me or something brand new that it's just hard to get go from a standing start i would imagine oh that's such an interesting point yeah i think i already made a mental categorization of what fortnight is and the brand doesn't attract me anymore because that's i i imagine it's these dances that teenagers and children are doing on youtube and it's very hard to win i don't know i just i've categorized fortnite as a game

for young people that i would and i know that's not true i know there's plenty of adults that engage with the game but then thinking about lego i know a lot of adults that still buy lego and they have now the power to spend because they're quite expensive so it's almost become a hobby as an expensive hobby for an adult to have to indulge when you were a child you couldn't buy it because it was quite expensive and now as an adult you have the purchasing power for it yeah i feel lego is attracting me more with how i categorize the type of fun i'm going to get yeah i mean we have lego in our office if that gives you any indication of the agency yeah exactly so i think that that's probably a good starting point for building a new metaverse is building on a brand of lego and i don't think it's necessarily building i don't think it's necessary block building i don't think that's what it will be i think it will just be more themed like lego and as matt says probably leans into lego is ugc um which seems like a good fit the other

thing i was going to say is about the rays and i always like trying to figure out when you hear a number like two billion it's it's what does that get you and the the the mass that uh the method i always do is i imagine that it costs let's say a hundred thousand dollars per person per year like to as a you know a rough ballpark so at the risk of getting my maths wrong here i think that works out at 20 000 person years worth of money yeah so let's so let's imagine that let's imagine spend half of that on marketing so now there's only 10 000 uh person years you're with me so far and then let's imagine that you build the metaverse over 10 years that's a team of 1 000 people over 10 years that's what that pays for so and what is gta gta is about a thousand people so uh you know team size so sort of comparable with that i mean i guess that's right but you know

when you look at that two billion dollars then you see there's a number and go oh it sounds like a large amount but it's enormous if it's to build a lego metaverse i mean maybe that's what it takes i'm not suggesting it's easy to do but it's just a lot if it's really spent on the production of of that then it's just like i can't think of anything bigger that's uh that's been built that is such a great breakdown i was trying to picture how much to be i've never had two billion in my life so no i'm sorry to announce this no so i i struggle to even picture owning that money what what does it pay for yeah that's that's really interesting david so i think it's um if they're really spending on production then they really got a long lot of people to get that right to build something very rich i mean i'd love to know i wonder what size uh roblox the production team is on that

i doubt it's a thousand people i don't know well it's one thousand plus everyone else that currently works at epic uh correct i mean bill is not saying oh i don't know you know they're not new hires necessarily but i'm just saying it's just either way it's an enormous team yeah and i think one one thing that we haven't spoken about is that the 2 billion it was actually 1 billion from sony and 1 billion from kirkby which is the investment company behind lego so sony getting involved with one billion investment sounds like they've hedged their bet on yeah i don't think that maybe they feel that i mean i don't think that i don't normally see sony as they see more as an electronics company than a network company japanese companies don't tend to be and you know i think that i would give epic a greater chance of creating the metaverse than sony because i think sony's expertise is not in

uh those sort of networked universes i mean playstation home maybe a while ago but you know that was about as close as they got so if i were sony and maybe you have a decision as to whether or not you put money into playstation or whether or not you put money into a company that stands a better chance of building the metaverse no disrespect for anybody working in sony but i i guess epic has a better track record of building that kind of thing it's also not the first round of investment that sony has put into epic as i recall um and maybe it's um there's a couple reasons like i think sony music was one of the previous investors and so fortnite is sort of an outlet for them to promote their artists uh perhaps to promote their movie ips um and you know as we saw with the bungee acquisition there's a desire on sony's part to have these multiplayer experiences that they that are not locked into the game pass

ecosystem um so maybe there's a few other reasons as well yeah and also not a bad investment i guess you would you would imagine an epic um i mean they're not publicly listed but you would imagine that their private share prices increa their value is increasing over time right so it's not it's not spending money it's investing money for for sony yeah it also feels that epic maybe has a head start as well because they already have a good collection of the epic online services they have experience they have experienced teams that have built a distribution product by their launcher and i know a lot of games out there that choose to integrate with epic online services instead of building their own game game services even you know player data so working with someone that has a track record that has already done this successfully well yeah i mean i think it makes sense the um who what are the companies that are going to build the metaverse i mean who are the people that are likely to do it

you would say that maybe and and i you know metaverse means lots of things different people but i mean i would say if you think that metaverse we're kind of seeing it right now in roblox and minecraft people spending a lot of time in line on fortnight so i would say it's likely one of those companies that stand best chance i don't think it's going to come from nowhere i think it's going to come from people we know so so you would say that epic are one of maybe five that stand a chance to uh build the metaverse or the metaverse that is popular yeah i was thinking about uh i think i saw an article this morning that meta announced that in their metaverse they're taking a cut 40 percent or something like that from creators it was almost 50 oh it's crazy it's like i think 47 47 and a half absolutely tone death oh we should have i could have gone into this one but i mean everybody else in web three is saying that will take five ten percent

and um there's meta i'm looking to take 50. just absolutely tone-deaf about what's going on in the industry um there we go i'll go on record as saying i i think i've already said but i really hope it's not meta that uh creates the metabolism yeah yeah we already have uh you know apple in a lawsuit because the 30 is too high and then meta goes oh we can get more than that it's outrageous yeah and an epic already has maybe some a reputation within game dev that they take lower cuts for example and so you prefer to put your game on epic yeah you want to be on that platform they're they're all for open standards you know they're fighting apple to create open uh distribution platforms and they're you know i think that they are very fair company i mean they'll they'll commit you know do things to be commercially successful but they'll that includes dropping the fee to distribute the game

down to what is it eight percent on the epic store you know so usually their moves are in the favors they're developer friendly right compared to meta as you say you're doing 48 absolutely bananas anyway i'm sorry mata if you're hearing i know you know my burning bridges here no no it's a fair it's a fair assessment it's what we're all thinking yeah exactly before we move on maria can i kind of quickly return to an earlier topic this will be quick i promise uh so okay if we're talking about american english versus english english if it's lego and not legos shouldn't it be math and not maths oh you see i'm that guy that tries to correct people and then digs myself into a hole i mean you said maths earlier and i was like what is that you know it's uh let me come back to you next week with exactly why both my answers are correct

there get the oxford english dictionary and things right now when i i'm just kidding but no when i first moved to to england from portugal i actually bought a grammar book to try to have better grammar because i never really learned it formally and then i swear about half the book was about exceptions so they tell me a rule and then a few pages of all of the words that are exceptions very complicated it's it's a mess of a language just let you know that like most americans and i'm assuming most brits also did not know much grammar probably still don't yeah that's that's not it's not unique to people who don't i'm gonna i'm gonna stop being a parent on this podcast it doesn't it doesn't put me in a good light you're meant to be the professor you're just carrying on your reputation i appreciate i'm a stickler for grammar so i appreciate it so just yeah last last thing on on the lego on the lego metaverse when i was reading this i just started

going into my deep space imagination and i was imagining myself in this big empty room in a virtual space i had my little map of the lego and then i could go walk and pick up the pieces and build this structure in this room and there are two great things about it it cost me less than it actually costs hopefully to buy an actual lego set because they are eye watering expensive that i currently don't make and also we don't require house space to keep your constructions you just do it and then you don't have to dust it because it gathers a lot of dust hey i hope you're getting this tim sweeney we're getting the metaverse all planned out by maria here this is what this is what people want only only costs 500 million for my ideas it's okay that's pretty this is this is why they took building out of fortnite so they could replace it with legos there you go oh there you go yeah okay just question ma if you could build something in lego in this metaverse what

would it be you have five seconds to answer oh my goodness i don't know uh anything like um so probably some like massive building or tower of some kind like i'm not very creative off the top okay classic think about this yeah like a large building i don't know david what would you build you know i had 10 seconds more to think about yeah i still got nothing no i think uh i would build a enormous sort of marble one do you know what i'm talking about i like watching those contraptions on youtube where the marble starts oh like a rube goldberg machine yeah there you go and sometimes i see people doing that in minecraft with carts right anyway i don't know i'm not sure it's a great idea you know what i would i would make a i would make my cat out of legos that's what i would oh there you go you can make your your corgi hold somebody i could do that too yeah what about you maria you've had 30 seconds now oh i would definitely build an enormous red panda and then hopefully i can customize it with some

kind of fuzzy fur and it has haptic feelings and then every day i could go in my metaverse and hug a red panda that's really soft surprisingly specific i know you just knew that had i thought about this all right and then miniclip um yeah pivoting away from web browser games they launched miniclip.com on 2001 and we've had an episode reminiscing on what many games we played and i think their current plan is that they're going to keep this the the website in its current format until summer of this year yes we're in 20 2022 we are to this year so very soon they're going to pivot to um to mobile games and the website is going to become for news and information about the company yeah to me i mean that isn't a huge surprise i mean well i maybe i should

look this up but i would imagine i'd be surprised if the revenue from uh browser was anything more than single digits these days percentage i mean i i mean sure they would they would go to them and congregate i guess with the go-to for flash games back in the day but that's not what people are playing right they've all moved to mobile and uh maybe that's easier to monetize as well so you know it's i guess they what games are they keeping online they're keeping agario and um so yeah i think they're just focusing there on energy on mobile that makes sense to me yeah well i think congregate will become one of the only web browser platforms out there this is a poorly researched segment but i think congregate didn't they move all the way to mobile do they have much of a web presence anymore i feel like congregate was making a blockchain play

i thought yeah yeah they are they're doing that i just i think that i'd be surprised to congregate putting a lot of energy into their browser games these days either and i thought that they'd move right across to mobile but hey the the the plane feels wide open to for browser games nobody's making them anymore i visited their website their their browser game website who who concluded the congregate yeah yeah yeah it's still there okay all right so it's got it wrong but i didn't actually play a game so maybe link out to the to the store yeah yeah okay you know i mean it's a um i think i see that a lot of mini clips seem to be spending a lot of energy on mobile have done for a while a lot of acquisitions in mobile some of which they announced some of the which they don't i know some of the ones that they've acquired but haven't announced which seems to be their way of doing things and then there's bigger companies with ilion that make a bubble shooter game which is massive right in terms of dau so i think

that they are doing a lot in in a inorganic growth i.e you know acquiring companies which seems to be their mo and they seem to be focusing on getting players rather than necessarily getting revenue i think the idea being that they can move players around because they've got such a high dau from games like april paul that they can move uh players from game to game and save on some uh costs and some people i know in the mini family seem to say tell me that works really well so um yeah and not too much for surprise that they're doubling down on mobile i just try to congregate game and it does work it does work yeah so they'll they'll take maybe almost the full market of browser games maybe yeah yeah it must be very small revenue if miniclip is ready to not even maintain it and move on full to to mobile yeah although ironically

uh blockchain games are generally being built in browser i mean most most right because distribution is a problem company on the steam company on the app stores i can't put it on playstation stores etc so most a lot of stuff going back to browser and it's interesting speaking to unity and saying hey how's your browser version of youtube nobody's asked us that for 10 years and now everyone's asking about it you know interesting yeah sorry maria i was going to say it doesn't seem like it's that big of a pivot right like going from browser games to mobile games like there was a you know a little while back there was the push into instant games which to me doesn't seem like too dissimilar from browser games really um so it makes a lot of sense to me as an outside of observer yeah and i believe miniclip did an announcement that they're not anti-nft i think their announcement was that they're watching the space and so maybe in the future they'll get

into it but they're not in a rush to jump into the market and lead it so perhaps that's why they're okay to move away from the browser games yeah i mean i think that we talked about it earlier didn't we but i think it's a perfectly valid strategy for incumbent companies with with successful franchises to say look we're just going to wait to see who figures this out the blockchain stuff and we'll in the meantime we'll just keep building call of duty and fifa and you know other enormous franchises and when we when it becomes clear who really understands this stuff then we'll focus money at acquiring that company much in the same as activision did when they bought king a few years ago so i think that i don't think it's a poor strategy for to to wait to see um which companies figure it out in the blockchain space yeah and i think 10 cent has a majority stake in miniclip and i think they're wholly owned aren't they fully owned okay and they saw their

domestic games market revenue go down do you think this is also part of tencent's strategy to expand and have such a big company like miniclip that exp is experienced has a long running history to dive into mobile no i think that i mean that's a podcast in itself and also there's there's better uh experts on tencent than me but i think that a lot of what tencent are trying to do is diversify everything you know in terms of genre but also in terms of geography so that you're not so there's a company that are not susceptible to changes in policy in the east which is why they own the majority of uh epic all of epic i forget no not all of epic course not just talking about that but but you know i have a foothold in sumo in you know they own sumo and you know some pretty big riot games supercell right exactly exactly so i think you

could say it's the mother of all spread bits geographically category everything and i'm sure and i think they sort of leave those companies alone just to yeah that's my understanding yeah um but um so i mean i don't think i don't think miniclips makes up a big enough part of 10 cent for it to be 10 cent strategy i think it's just one part of the spread bet if you see what i mean yeah yeah that that definitely makes sense and i was wondering matt you know from with your product manager hat on um and i was reading an interview of miniclip ceo where he was talking about how they don't focus on monetizing the game i think david mentioned a bit earlier on in his opinion that they focus on getting a lot of players and having great retention metrics and so they're playing the really long game they've been around for 21 years or so so they can afford the they can afford the

weight and they're not looking to just get the max revenue that they can out of short amount of space well what do you think about this from a product management perspective um well i mean i'm not super familiar with their games but it seems like they're all relatively like casual small experiences um so usually the way that those get monetized is through ads um i can't speak for mini clip specific specifically i don't know if they use ad monetization but that seems like a good fit for what you were just describing and um you know to to link it back to our tencent discussion they're sort of known for come stay and then pay right that's their strategy quote unquote so you come you stick around for a while enjoy the game and then eventually we'll get you to convert to a payer um and you know that strategy makes sense to me um but um yeah i mean the cross promotion point is is is valid like keeping players in your ecosystem and especially

if you're doing an ad monetization model you're cycling them through the games but they're also viewing ads in all of the games so i could see that possibly working i don't i don't know what their what mini clip is doing for monetization but i mean i mean i i had a conversation with assad about it i hope it's not confidential it's one of these um so this is the ceo and i had a conversation with him about so well one thing is about uh network ltv the idea that you acquire somebody in one game and then you move them around and so you can't just look at the ltv from one game that you've acquired them into you have to look at the network of games that they play which is one thing and it's it's easy to make them things add up the ua get a positive return on ad spend if you look at network ltv and not just ltv that's one thing the other thing was um yeah the bit the told me was i was asking him about payback windows so i don't know what your payback windows guys are on on your mobile games but you know uh 3 6 9

12 months i guess you know 12 months on is the outside of which where you would expect you would hope to see a return on the ad spend right just typically what browse is um and he he was saying to me that no i'm happy to have a negative row ass i said well that's just you losing money isn't it why why would you do that you know his point was that it's brand building so he's happy to lose money on uh getting a million people in because now you've got a set of people playing it and it starts to become a thing it's like it's brand advertising in the same way as advertising your game on the side of the buses now you've got a million people playing it and it's a thing and i just never thought of it like that i've always thought of it as hey you've got to make sure that if you spend money on an ad then you'll get a positive return on that after some period of time and he appeared to have a different attitude to that i mean i'm not sure if that's borne

out in the numbers but it was a different way of thinking about things that's interesting i i've i've thought of that in in more like multiplayer and pvp con context where like having a bunch of players has value in and of itself because it looks like the community is active as a bunch of people invested in a certain game i've not thought about it from the context of the type of games that miniclip is is making but that's really interesting and then to your point about payback windows i've actually seen like two three year payback windows um in mobile at least um so that's that's actually not surprising to me right right yeah i haven't fully heard about negative payback windows well in it maybe i mean when you get to past the year then it's quite hard to predict what's going to happen after a year i mean all sorts of things could you know we've had idfa that's happened do you know it's a long period of time to be confident in your ability to see

return so the further out you go i think the more risky it comes so maybe you take a more holistic view and it's just about building critical mass in a game because you think that once you get to critical mass whatever that is then um then cool things start to happen that's a bit vague isn't it well it does it does feel with a cross promotion and bringing a lot of players in and keeping in keeping them in their ecosystem that miniclip is potentially particularly ready to survive in a post idfa world yeah they probably better the nature of their games is probably better for oh they could suffer idfa better than most yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah i think so yeah they'll probably be fine well and on a happy note miniclip just opened a studio in portugal oh there you go that's your home country right it is

portugal is a great country so if you want some beach weather i i didn't get paid by miniclip to say this by the way but i'm doing publicity to my country great place to live in very good very good choice miniclip i i everything i hear about portugal is good well i've obviously visited it's a very nice place in the world um do they acquire a studio or do they just some must have been something that they acquired i think they just said they just yeah just set something up yeah okay yeah portugal is quite investment friendly for international countries cool well that takes us to the end of the episode yeah i mean we were going to talk a little bit about uh take two and odd sort of financial mechanical things like what are they convertible notes and that kind of stuff but maybe maybe that's one for aaron actually he get you know that's the sort of thing that gets him excited isn't it well now he talked about it so

david did they would do the homework and now i think he saw that he's not going to be able to flex and show off his homework efforts so we we have five minutes left we can talk about it uh oh i haven't got that much to say about it it's like there's not even much to it right they are getting alone because they can't quite have enough money to buy zynga and zynga then buying zinger is 13 billion dollars and they're looking for let me see like about three is it 2.9 2.7 yeah okay so they're just getting a loan and that would to be turned into shares at some point later so they got enough money to buy zinger i i think that's all that is good do you think it was planned that they would they knew that they would have to take out it seems like a huge loan it's more than the the race that they've got that's yeah that's a that's a good point i guess that their market cap is is is big and can sustain that and it all adds up truthfully i've never worked at that part of the

that high up in a big public company to figure out how all that stuff works it's just another world to me but uh you know i did do a little research it's a loan in order to buy some shares later it's quite a simple idea i think yeah i assume they can default on the loan if it's a loan well if they default on it that's a good question and i'm glad you asked me because i also looked that up that if the company goes bankrupt then they're first in line to get paid back so it's a special kind of loan oh interesting okay so they sell all their air on chairs and that pays for the three billion dollars that they've you know all their office furniture gets sold off to pay off yeah but uh yeah i don't i don't know how that stuff works and also i've got feeling that somebody that's made it this far through the podcast is now listening to me talk about something i don't really understand so i'm going to shut up the financial engineering section of the podcast yeah there you go everyone david's homework um evidence evidence presented

well thank you very much for joining matt and david cheers if you are a listener or you're watching on youtube and you think about what would you build in your lego metaverse you can join us on the navic discord and share i'm very curious i'm wondering if you can beat fuzzy red panda yeah that's true and you know you're giving people more than 10 seconds to think about it as well big big tower big time sure someone can come up with something better than a large building [Laughter] well um thanks for joining and we'll see you next week in the next episode [Music] you