Shooter Monthly #9: Battlefield's Hot Streak, Gears Goes Helldiving, and the Battle Pass Plateau

This game is going to ship early next year from Bungie and this is the first time anybody has ever seen it. It's the first time they've debuted it. The original Doom was a really significant jump in gaming technology for the time.
And there's one more thing we'll bring to Battlefield.
That chainsaw.
I had to fight for that. programming mods are building, you know, their own level within Unreal
for Call of Duty. Call of Duty. Call of Duty. Call of Duty. Entirely new Call of Duty.
Call of Duty. Call of Duty. One of the fascinating new additions to your squad [music] is a dog.
Hey, is that about ready?
These things, they take time. Uh that is the opening to shooter monthly episode 10. The crew is back in the holster. We have assembled today

over what has been an exhilarating summer for shooters. I can see in each of our co-hosts eyes there's never better time to be in a first-person shooters as we've talked about. And we have some awesome stuff to talk about today. We're going to be hitting on battle pass design. There have been like a series of I don't know if we can call them coordinated changes to battle passes across key firsterson shooter franchises. Black Cell is introducing a loyalty program. My god, you almost never see that. You never see a VIP program in a western game, much less an HD game. Battlefield is bringing back past content. It's not necessarily exclusive to the past, or at least that's what they've clarified in a blog post. Overwatch is introducing a new way to earn, a new systems design. So, Battle Pass is on the move. We have new announcements from old franchises. We have Gears of War Eday, which we need to talk about. Yes, that is a shooter. Isn't first-person shooter monthly? We also have Halo. Do you remember that?

That game, that other franchise that Microsoft purchased and then gave to a developer and destroyed capital value of. Well, that has released a remastered version of its campaign. one of the most glorious days for all first-person shooter fans. It's performance. We'll analyze and then we have some top leaderboards of where engagement has been this summer. And despite the fact that EA's plan, what they want like 500 million, what's 500 million uniques or they wanted some crazy number EA had for Battlefield? But it still looks like despite Battlefield's troubles, is this the best retaining Battlefield for us? It's like holding its own against Call of Duty.
I think it's actually doing really, really good in terms of number of users. I think right now, at least from what I checked a couple of days ago on Steam, Battlefield has more users than Call of Duty. Again, this is the year where Activision issued an athology for Call of Duty. Battlefield was the top selling

shooter and one of the top selling games last year. like a lot of shooters in the shooter space number of users dropped a lot since launch, but they're sustaining quite well. I noticed also like around season 2 or season 3, they've got multiple spikes when it comes to reacquisitions. But it seems like the spikes are getting bigger with more sustain retained users. And I think they're bringing back Wake Island soon, which excites a lot of Battlefield players. A lot of people also worked on Battlefield gets excited about this. So, I think the way they've been programming things is really interesting. I think they're also investing quite in ranked play. It's now part of the Battlefield Labs. It's not fully released. I think they're talking about even in season 4 it's going to be part of their experimental competitive play, but it's been I think a while since Battlefield had competitive play in it. So, that's another reason. So, there's they're firing on a lot of cylinders when it comes to retaining players. I'm uh I'm happy again. Stockholm, Sweden overall,

but I'm sure the Battlefield Studios extend beyond that. But um being based in Sweden, I'm just going to say it's a good country to make shooters overall.
For us, you mentioned the success of Battlefield. So, right now, courteous of video game insights, we're looking at the MAU and we're looking at it over the last 6 weeks for the subjeter genre. And for PC Steam, Battlefield is in fifth place with 2.2 2 million MAU. And for PlayStation, Battlefield is also in fifth place, which 3.4 million MU. It It does show that Battlefield is leading Call of Duty on the PC platform. Call of Duty actually doesn't even appear in the top 10, which is even more strange when you consider that it's a single joint skew. Remember that? That was one of the things that got updated on the Steam store is you just launched Call of Duty. So, like everything gets grouped together, but still not in the top 10. And then on PlayStation, Call of Duty is number two, just below Fortnite at 10 million and Fortnite has 27.5 million

MAU. So like what do we know about Battlefield that crusty Germans who have PCs in various parts of Bavaria? Play the [ __ ] out of this game. I don't know for if you have a if you have a different interpretation, but like I I guess I'm also curious. You're saying that the Battlefield is retaining better than it normally has as a franchise. It does look like this is a pretty good result for the franchise relative to Call of Duty, but what are they doing? Are they just pounding more money in?
Well, there's a bunch of things that are happening here compared to previous Battlefields. A, this is the first Battlefield in a while that has a free-to-play skew. So, you have Veritzk
and the previous Battlefields like 2042, Battlefield 5, Battlefield 4, Battlefield 1 did not have a free-to-play component in them. So I think this is one of the biggest drivers here for a lot of users. The second thing is what I just mentioned. Battlefield 6 did sell quite a bit was very wellreceived. One of the top shooters last year and it outdone

Battlefield. So again starting from very strong base for the players in terms of number of users been acquired that also helps quite a bit. And then the third thing is I think they're again firing on multiple cylinders. are trying to do some interesting things in red sick but again the seasons have been interesting re-engaging players and I think this fourth season is showing a more interesting spike. I think it seems from looking at this fourth season that it's going to have even better attention than previous two and releasing Wake Island not just at the beginning of the season but a little bit into it will maybe push another spike. They have a a couple of changes on the way as I mentioned with ranked play that are doing that in the battlefield labs but once that comes out of also battlefield labs might also impact retention quite a bit. So
are you telling me ranked is coming to Battlefield?
It is already in it in the red but they're push Oh my god. I've seen I've seen there at at DICE we used to have we

used to have slideware uh it's software that you can just make on PowerPoints. It's it's awesome. never been simpler. And ranked for Battlefield was always on there and it never usually got off the door. Remember, we actually tried to do ranked for Battlefield 1 in a small 5v5 format that was out of DICE LA and that did not succeed in the way we had hoped. But you're telling me it's out, but just for RedSack, it needs to be for the base game. [snorts]
But that's the thing. I wasn't there for Battlefield 1, but at the beginning now they're doing it for Reds. But then they've actually announced in their blog post that redec rank play will still be in the Battlefield Labs for season 4, but they're actually considering also adding it for the multiplayer part of the game. So it's on the battle royale segment of the game right now, but it's going to get expanded to the rest of the game, which I find interesting. I think if done correctly, it will drive their attention quite a bit and we've seen that success quite a bit in in Apex. I think ranked play is one of the key drivers as well for attention in Apex when you look at how much the players

are attached to that on on top of a lot of other things. So I also noticed they're doing a leaderboard called elite top 250 which is at the end of the ranked ladder. You start hitting the elite and you're in the top 250 on that elite ladder which I find fascinating. I usually whenever I'm designing games or helping on the product road map for a game, I push leaderboards for like later on in the life cycle so we don't have to build them because usually they're filled with hackers. So you don't usually usually want leader boards. But I guess if you contain your leaderboard to a small amount of players like 150 maybe you can actually catch them and you can maintain them. So I think it's something that I'll be keeping an eye on as well and see maybe maybe leaderboards are back.
Do you know what they do next year? Like the strategy for Call of Duty is well trotten. We're going to see another version, another marketing push. Battlefield 7 is not coming next year. I feel very confident making that claim. They can't support their ongoing

development at the prior size they were operating at, which by the way is completely logical. Of course, they can't support like a thousand developers. I think Battlefield 6 has a bigger number of studios working on it than previous ones. I think they announced multiple times like Andrew Winston said they're going all in on it and it paid off. Um I think historically they don't release Battlefields back to back. So I'll be extremely surprised if a new Battlefield shows up this year. I don't think this is going to happen judging when nothing's announced etc. So I think a lot of what's riding next for Battlefield is what Call of Duty will do this year. Again, if Call of Duty doesn't deliver really well and it has a lot of interesting challenges with it, that's one thing. The other thing that maybe will pop up in Battlefield, but I'm not sure it necessarily fits the franchise as much is um since the success of our traders, there's a lot of maybe push for extraction experience to

come back and look at Call of Duty for example, the bringing back DMZ. I wouldn't be surprised if some people are looking into some sort of extraction experience, but I'm not sure that would be the way to go for Battlefield. I think they pulled off something really good here and if they just build upon it for the next one, they have a good chance to succeed with Bretzig. Maybe the next thing for Battlefield should be either building upon what you have right now or doing something that's really different. Doing something like what Call of Duty does when they release, you know, Black Ops and then they go to Modern Warfare. What would be the thing for Battlefield? What would be the the zig and the zag here? Like right, you notice in Call of Duty what they did, they release Modern Warfare, then they release another game in the year after in the Modern Warfare universe. People cut the deep. So I think Battlefield needs to find out what would be the alternating releases that they can do. I mean, you saw some of the Battlefield UI be modeled after Call of Duty, right? And Call of Duty really adopt this franchise Netflix tileike UI and

Battlefield had some hints of that. I mean, I I always remember conversations that from one DICE GM being like, why are we building the store over and over and over again? Why the [ __ ] are we building the same thing over and over again? And Call of Duty unified around a common engine, right? It took a lot of time and honestly, a lot of the benefits around that the unification actually didn't pan out. You guys remember Call of Duty War Zone mobile game? Rest in peace. Killed a lot of phones. It got so hot. But like a lot of those things didn't pan out.
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Saturi, it's the Japanese Zen [music] Buddhist term for sudden enlightenment. That flash where everything clicks. We're told that Heroic Labs team had theirs [music] when they realized that most studios run live ops like a horoscope. Vague, kind of generic, same advice for everyone. So, they built Sattorii, realtime experimentation, player level personalization, events that actually respond [music] to player behavior, save to your old live ops stack, and Konichiwa to Sattorii from heroic labs. I think the unification of Call of Duty eventually caused some of the challenges they're facing right now, right? Basically, it was very very cool when they managed to unify progression, unify

everything together. And then now every skew they were releasing was part of the same progression. But then at some point they had to when you go to the battle pass and look at content in Call of Duty, it will tell you, oh, this weapon that you're going to unlock works only on this game. This weapon you're going to unlock works only on those two games. And then that became a mess to manage. So they started like okay as soon as we release a new game we take out the content from the old one and then we focus the progression on the new one. And then the players had a huge amount of cosmetics from the beginning of the game because the cosmetics carried forward. So that resulted into as soon as you buy a new Call of Duty you see Nicki Minaj all over the place. So I I think the unification of Call of Duty was beneficial for a while but then it ended up and resulting some of the challenges they're facing right now. If you're using the similar like tech stack, I guess you do save money on rebuilding the store over and over again and maybe some UI elements, but that's not where the biggest costs in making those games. I think also most probably at Call of Duty it came at the cost of

clearer UX, which wouldn't necessarily bad, but complex UX has like straight correlation with losing players. So there there's a lot of things about that unification of tech that Colin Duty did that resulted in some challenges down the line, but it was a great play early on.
And to go down the line of thinking that Frost mentioned in terms of what could be next, you mentioned an extraction mode. It's very interesting. Battlefield I think five, I think that's the one that took place in World War II. It had a battle royale mode if you guys remember it, but it was locked behind the premium games skew, so to speak. And then 2042 Battlefield had actually, if you guys remember, an extraction mode to it that was also locked behind the premium skew. So if they were to go to the extraction mode route, that in itself presents a business challenge. There aren't really a lot of good, decent, free-to-play

extraction games out there. DMZ wasn't was a free-to-play mode in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 a few years back. Hawkins disrespect [ __ ] cycle cycle. I hope someone from the team the cycle throws some guff.
So if they were to go to Battlefield, if they were to go to an extraction mode route, I'd be very curious to see how they deliver out to players. Would it be behind a pay wall in the main game or would it be a mode in and of itself? Would be very curious on that. And by the way, I don't think we even know how this year's DMZ will be packaged towards players. There was one other leaderboard observation that I think Chris you had made and number three on PC, number four on PlayStation. Goddamn Apex Legends making cash money. Is there anything you'd like to to say?
Yeah, real quick on that note as well in the chart that we just last saw on your screen was two of the top five highest played shooters on the market are both from EA. So EA seems to have a knack on

that market, which is great to see. And when it comes to Apex Legends topping the charts when it comes to revenue last week on Steam only on Steam, topping games such as Counterstrike as well, it is remarkable. If there's any one thing that comes to mind was hardly by Apex Legends as of the current ban that's that's making the game right now, they are nothing if not consistent. I will say the game has never been in a better state from a core loop gameplay now than it's ever been before. So, it's a good product, number one. Number two, there has never been an update that really burns the player base. As in there's never been an update or a big content update or a big seasonal update that makes people angry, which in of itself is a big win. You know, they're always retaining, they're always growing their player base. And when you do all the boring stuff right, then it's impossible not to make revenue at the same time. So, I think that is very commendable for the team and for the title.
Can I tell you another story, Chris? I

agree with what you're mentioning, but what I would highlight is something that was announced quite a while ago, which was EA's massive expansion into the supply side of Apex Legends in terms of studios. More headcount with inside of Respawn, more headcount in original studios in Madison where Call of Duty also has an outfit. God knows how many outsourcers, contractors, and developers, but like just a major supply side push. And it's something that I have directly felt as an Apex Legends player is that they have a live ops cycle for content. And it's a really strong content cycle. It's not just cosmetics, it's gameplay. They have templates that they reuse which is straight out of the mobile play. And I know this because a lot of their PMs are of the mobile ilk and so they know how to build live ops infrastructure. And so when I think about like the best live ops in shooters, I would say in the top five, clearly Apex Legends and also I would say Call of Duty I think is sometimes underrated despite being a box product. But like the things that they have stacked in

this product over time have like just always blown me away. So they have mini battle passes now tied to characters which are interesting. They have hairirloom shards, which is a way you can earn ultra premium items that was only unlocked after you open the 500th box in the original release. You can see it right here on the screen right now if you're watching the video version. They're really cool melee weapons, very similar to Counterstrike. They have [ __ ] gameplay integrations with IP holders. There was a Final Fantasy tie-in now. Like there's no beat that this team hasn't Exactly. Like they've milked every inch for this game to succeed. Like they've even added to core gameplay the vaulting mechanic where now you have to time your jumps when you vault an object and if you do you get a little boost over the object. I mean that is a core gameplay feature that affects its core innovation movement that they are shipping after what a [ __ ] decade of this product. I mean, people are still touching this

stuff a decade after, which to me is like our Markhamm bravery that a lot of other people would be like, "Oh, no, it's perfect." Like, I don't ever want to touch this movement and they are willing to do that, which I commend them for.
I really, really, really like how Apex does their collabs. Like for example, I'm a huge fan of fans of seven fans. So when you mentioned Final Fantasy, I was like, I need to touch talk about that one a bit.
Buster sword man.
Yeah, that's the thing. They like instead of adding cloud and separate into the game straight or diva into the game, I like that they maintain the integrity of the universe and they basically included the items that are very signature from the game. They added outfits that are inspired by the characters and I think that's been their approach to collabs overall and and I think I like that way more than just adding characters from different universes into your game. Obviously each of those has their own advantages but I really really like how they approach Cababs in ter of maintaining the integrity for their universe and I think it just doesn't break the immersion of the game. So their approach to collabs

has always been impressive to me.
Totally. They could decide on the Square Enix side of things. Square Enix the digital entertainment is up 90% year-over-year in terms of revenue. So, they're doing something right. Collaborations may be part of that. And a grand claim I'm going to be making about Apex Legends now, take it or leave it, is I do think out of all the most played shooters that we saw on the previous list. My statement, my claim is that Apex Legends is best positioned to grow even more in the future. Out of all those games listed, there is no game with as much of a foothold in China as much as Apex Legends has. So, as good as Apex Legends is doing now, and as long as they've been around for, I wouldn't be surprised that in the next five or even 10 years, Apex Legends will be even bigger than what it is now due to their foothold in overseas market.
They're also, by the way, they're big in Japan, which I think people sometimes don't pick up on. like a lot of their characters really resonate with the Japanese audience and so they have responded with that with the Final Fantasy IP integration or the Gundam IP

integration like they are serving their regional market I think in a really effective way. They did release a mobile version a while ago but that was taken down but I still think that's worth revisiting in terms of growth as you mentioned and just like imagine Apex being on mobile as well. It's a big big room for them. Mobile shooters are well they've grown big a while ago and now there's they're still big but I think like for a pre-existing IP to open up a market like that I think it's going to be amazing especially for a game like Apex and it being really big in Asia. I think mobile is a very very growth opportunity. Do you think they were like a little bit ahead of their time and maybe they should revisit it after after shutting it down and bring it back? Because I mean they did hire I don't know who who they actually hired or if the position is still open, but they hired like a head of shooter life service like everything. So maybe there's like a strategy here of like revisiting this as Apex kind of cuz I think when they originally launched mobile, Apex wasn't necessarily in like it was fine but it wasn't in like an amazing spot cuz it's gone through it's

gone through a lot of up and downs. I mean, I think it's something as well to point out to the team's resilience is like Apex has had ups and we often talk about, you know, how how all these goods are, but there was a lot of lot of developer work put into making it what it is now from where it was maybe even like a couple years ago. So, it's very impressive. Maybe it's time they kind of revisit that and see if there's a way that they can maybe soft launch it or, you know, if there's a way that they can test the hypothesis of like maybe this is now time to to focus on mobile or at least, you know, relive the mobile skew.
I think so. I think it was a totally different skew as well is one thing that I found interesting back then. I think the game was even in 3P if I remember correctly. I guess the game was taken down for reasons. So, they'd have to revisit those reasons. But I think what would make sense is basically like at some point Apex wasn't doing as great as now, but the team has managed to succeed of sustaining this game through multiple of these periods where things weren't looking as great as now. But I think if they want to revisit mobile, my way to

approach it would be to actually go with a similar game, if not the same game on mobile instead of at least being first person with similar content in it versus going the old route if it's a it's a different game for mobile and 3P. That would be my take on it.
The bar to entry for a mobile shooter now is way higher than it was when Apex Legends Mobile first came out. What I mean by that is my suggestion if an Apex Legends mobile were to come out again in one in some form or another. It can't just be the battle royale mode. It also has to have other modes in it. I would benchmark the features to that of say a Call of Duty Mobile. Call of Duty Mobile is not just 5v5 arena shooter. It's also a battle royale and zombie modes as well. I think very high bar to do. Not a lot of teams in the world could do that. You have to have a very good partner to not just make a product at the same quality level that Apex Legends players expect, but also the breadth of the content that needed to even make mobile

players want to download the game in the first place. So, I'm just saying the bar is very high right now and that's not mentioning the rate of content as well.
But just to double check that one, I find that actually that hypothesis very interesting because there games already exist in the market that have multiple game modes. you have to kind of match that in terms of game modes. I find this is usually a challenge when you're releasing a product that has a price point because you're then trying to solve a value proposition problem, right? Like if you release a game that is being sold for x amount of dollars and there's a comparable product being sold for the same amount, but they have more maps, more content, and it's an issue. But do you think this is an actual problem for freetoplay premium players on mobile? like cuz they're not necessarily paying to download the game is going to impact more retention than acquisition or do you think even acquisition get impacted? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this. My thoughts would be to point out to Call of Duty War Zone Mobile where it was pretty much a onetoone example of a free-to-play mode Call of Duty Duty

Mobile on HD platforms, but for whatever reason did not not have enough juice for it to maintain support after X amount of years. So my concern is if there's just another Apex Legends mobile like that's one to one what people already have access to it would face similar challenges to that again assuming that's made by even a comparable team with a burn rate that's acceptable until you reach the point where you find it acceptable to run a business. COD Mobile is already already kind of a monster like they kind I don't know if they were cannibalizing or competing with themselves like there's more nuance there than it being just like a single mode. I think something about like when we talk about should they revisit this? I think a challenge especially for for larger companies is like whenever you do have this idea of like oh maybe we should revisit Apex. I think people start going down that path of like well what do the comps look like? We have to have all these modes. We have to all these things. So the project ends up becoming like very large. You start to run into pushing dates budgets going up. And so if there's a world where they are able to like, okay, let's just try a

single mode and see because if you try a single mode and fail, at least it wasn't as much effort as doing everything and also failing. If they're able to kind of put the proper restrictions on maybe let's try an Apex Mobile again. I think there's a way that they can do it in a relatively safe manner without putting a lot of like risk on on budgets and stuff. But I think this is like a real challenge with a lot of AAA companies is like trying something often just bloats because there's a lot of people, there's a lot of different ideas, there's a lot of risk aversion and so people are like, "Well, we have to do these things cuz that's more riskadverse." And so I think that may be like not only the idea of making an Apex mobile game. It's really like the red tape challenge of just trying something in the market is something I think they may run into. I love the idea of just like trying it out, putting out the battle royale mode. I say trying it out as if that's like super easy, but it's it's you know something at least like um I can see being discussed as a strategy going forward as Apex just continues to do well and to the points of like its value

in the east you know from a western perspective we may look at it differently but from an eastern perspective I think there's a lot of signs pointing to that there's some opportunity here whatever perspective size and apologies for going back to the complative thinking that being said to go back to what you mentioned perhaps to exploring this Apex Legends mobile would be like I'm sure you all played Garina Street Fighter are correct. So, how about that? But with AP Fred's movement, maybe that would be something that that would really stick out of the market. But
is that how we should think about that comparison? Like more UGC style elements or just more mode flexibility?
Yes. And if there's one thing they need to keep for Apex Legends Mobile, it's movement flexibility. And the good news is that those features can work in pretty much any other game if executed correctly. If a potential Apex Legends Mobile can compete on the features side of things for like the big dogs like Call of Duty Mobile, maybe they could not lower but but shoot at a more narrow lane. We would say like let's take a Garina Garina play style with Apex

Legends mobile movement. Let's see what that looks like. Maybe that could be in itself a differentiator in the market. Maybe that itself can make money for us to build upon later.
I want to believe that. But the struggle I have is that inside of the HD version of Apex Legends, like one of the growth strategies has been like, oh, we'll tack on these additional modes. And they've kind of hung around for a long time, but they've had like this CSGO style in round shop mode for a while. They [ __ ] around with like capture the flag. They kind of have this rotating list of trying to get people into other modes. And of course, like we know this is based on something that kind of sort of has supported Call of Duty playlists cuz it's basically Titanfall 2 without the without the wall running. but it hasn't landed. And I guess I'm just curious what the hangup is, right? Because everyone likes to say like I mean Chris, you had mentioned in our Pride podcast, imagine marathon but like deathmatch. Like bungee all this bungee stuff but deathmatch. And I guess like I asked the same question for Apex Legends about why they haven't really been able to expand other verticals, right? It

feels like all these first-person shooters are struggling to verticals. Like that's why War Zone is so interesting. It's like a it's a vertical that succeeded. DMZ, TBD. I mean, we're talking about 20 2042 that had its own extraction mode. We didn't talk about that for us. There was a Battlefield extraction mode attempt. Firestorm, I don't know. It just it growing these additional modes feels like the right growth strategy, but the success rate is damning.
I have a thesis, if you were ready to hear it on anyone you want to, please tear it apart as you see fit. My thesis as a lifelong shooter player is that battle royale plus movement options is a match made in heaven because the skill gaps are so huge yet the mode itself feeds itself into you getting in and getting out and you getting into another game after getting eliminated fast versus a timed arena shooter based on rounds or even just a timer in a high movement shooter is just torture if

you're on the losing side because you can't get out. they're stuck there. However, Marathon is I think in a sweet spot where it's not you can't move, but it's not a movement shooter. There's emphasis on gunplay. So, there's a perception it's a bit more fair that I think lends itself more to an arena type mode layout. If that makes sense. Let me know if you disagree or not. I think that's like a really good point. Like if I was like trying to build a strategy of like how do we grow it? Like add more modes. That's like a very basic strategy to think about. I think you're right. there's kind of like a core gameplay element here that's not being accounted for because I agree. I don't know why like even when I go and play like the TDM modes or the capture the flag modes, I find myself not being as engaged in them as I would assume I would be. I feel like anytime I'm playing TDM, I could be doing a better Apex Legends experience, which is battle royale.
You know, I do like Apex Battle Royale, but like I'm not like a hardcore battle royale player. And so for someone like me, I would assume that like it would hold it would bring me to Apex, but it never really has. And I think there was like an interesting point there of

you're right like if you are playing against players who are just kind of like you know running circles around you. You have to do that for 15 minutes or quit and just be like this game you know. So I think there's a really interesting perspective of like if you do die you always have that fresh restart in battle royale. I actually really like that thesis. I never really thought about it that way.
I agree with the hypothesis that you're stuck in there in the round when you're playing like a VR game. even if you're not really good at it and you're just messing around with with two of your friends like let's say jump into Apex haven't played in a while you're not doing so well but you're doing something that's just focused on your squad and you you're doing your own adventure versus if you're doing an arena a lot of arena modes are two teams usually bigger than three then you're playing as well with strangers with a full team and it's no longer you making your own story or messing around with your friends you're focused on winning or losing the these These game mods are just kind of like a zero sum game. You're either winning or losing. With a VR game, it's really fine if you lose, if you uh that actually

brought most probably maybe one of the few evolutions of the shooter space where actually additional shooter players were created when BRS became popular because of that. There was way less pressure on winning. I think extraction shooters were supposed to bring that to players, but they were really, really hardcorish until our greatest. I think a big part of the success was the extraction elements were accessible enough for players that don't care about winning to enjoy an extraction game. I think maybe that's one of the other challenges that arena modes or strict modes about two big teams fighting each other becomes a problem. The other thing it could be, you can make these modes about two teams fighting each other, but they're big in size. Like if you look at Conquest, for example, in Battlefield, if it's 32 versus 22 players or 64 versus 64, you're having an impact on the match is a bit difficult. So you end up playing within focusing on your squad, which is usually your friends or people you're matchmaking with. And as a result of

that, you go back to that sandbox element of creating your own adventure. So I think that's another layer to it on top of being stuck. It's also not having the freedom to find your own fun in a way.
I do tend to agree with like that social element. The challenge that I have with it is like under that assumption then like we should see this in other games that are focused on TDM. Like why aren't the players who enjoy just 5v5 COD TDM not moving over to Apex 5v5?
Where's my battle royale CS GO?
Remember it sucked ass.
Oh, that's right. That's right. Thank you. terrible. Granted, it could have just been an implement like a execution problem, but um yeah, it wasn't fun. Yeah, I I do agree on the social element for sure. Like, and also I think Arc Arc Raiders did a great job of it. It allows you to go in with your friends and like winning and losing is not really the goal. The goal is just having fun. You know, that's something important that Battle Royale and and Arc Raiders did specifically and expanded the shooter market. And maybe that expansion just doesn't go back to the more traditional

shooters of like the TDM world. You know, maybe it just doesn't translate. Speaking of things lost in translation, August 6th, Gears of War Eday. Remember, this is a franchise that exists. It is a prequel to the mainline Gears of War franchise. Quick catch up for people who have missed out on what I consider the most glorious gaming franchise of all time. This was owned by Epic Games. They invented it as basically just a tech demo for the Unreal Engine. Remember Cliffy B, famous game designer, got on to, I believe, the Xbox stage with the chainsaw shooter, the Lancer, started sawing [ __ ] up and eventually the franchise got sold after Gears War II to Microsoft and that's when things went really downhill. They've been really trying to figure out, first of all, how to just sell box copies. Mr. Aos, uh, is this franchise back to form? So, they recently had a closed beta on Steam and it had a peak occurrenc,000,

which in itself trumps every single Steam release of the franchise going back since the franchise was available on Steam. That being said, there's some nuance here. It was mostly a console focused franchise and there's also the Game Pass element to it and X and Microsoft Store if you guys remember that. That being said, it is remarkable that there is indeed a market for the game across HD consoles and the game's only going to be on Xbox and PC, correct? It's not going to come out on PS5.
I think should assume under the new Ball Sharma era.
Assuming that it's only going to come out on Xbox and PC, it's fair to say that PC will probably have three or maybe four times more players than Xbox users themselves. on top of the PC market being that much bigger overall than Xbox exclusive gamers themselves. That being said, I do believe the game the franchise has like shout out to

Richard Brown. He calls it a dad's IP, which is the case. That being said, I can't tell you anecdotally how many fathers I knew could not wait to play the Halo Combat Evolve game with their with their kids last month. So, in terms of how many units this thing could sell, I could see it sell over 5 million. Maybe it will sell more units. I I still have yet to take a look at the full feature sets the game will come out with. I think there's going to be a Hell Divers like mode as well. The Hell Divers player base, I think, is starving for more of that game. The Hell Divers 2 game itself is still doing pretty solid on Steam as far as I can tell. So the opportunity here is if the developers for Eday can really give experience in their EDY mode that not only makes their

current player base excited but also gets Hell Divers 2 players to come over. It could be something worth keeping an eye on.
Mr. Andros, this is the first question I was going to ask the panel. Like how do you remake this franchise in the wake of Hell Divers 2? It seems like this is unbelievable opportunity. Can anyone tell me who's going after Hell Divers?
So the opportunity here that Eay has compared to like Hell Divers, Hell Divers 2 has taken the stance of only focusing on PvE. So Gears of War will have PvP and PvE modes. So I'll be curious to see if that will be enough to bring players who play Hell Divers 2 who want a PvP mode to play this game.
They should just dump it. Why not just dump why don't they just [ __ ] dump PvP and just go with the extraction mode? This is the only interesting live service surface for this franchise. Doing arena PvP was not fun in what, Gears 4, Gears 3. No one cares about arena shooters anymore. Outdated formula. If you ain't got anything more

interesting, it's going to be your Hell Divers mode. They've always flirted with Horde, right? That has been their wild card. Remember they tried to do like RPG [ __ ] in the last years where they would have cards? Oh my god, there is some weird [ __ ] that modernization history went through. By the way, I see some interesting things in this beta that are kind of RPG-ish, but why not just go Hell Divers or Bust? That feels like an amazing play for this franchise. What's the better option
when it comes to a core leap mode when it comes to movements, shooting? There's different design choices between what again I haven't played the game eay, but from what I played in the past of other Gears of War games, there's definitely Gears of War specific gameplay loops better for some players versus what you can do with Hell Divers 2 and vice versa. Hell Divers 2 is has good movement, has good shooting, but it's very arcadey compared to Gears of War. Hopefully I'm making my point clear here. Yep. So, depends on what the player's preferences are in terms of how it feels to move and how it feels to shoot.

And you got to remember like for hell divers too, there's a strong emphasis on humor as well.
Talking about a car, [laughter]
but hopefully you know what I mean. They're like inadvertent humor like like emerging humor. You could call it that. It's actually a selling point I think for Elers 2. It's a franchise thing.
So there's charm to Elvis 2. I'm sure there's charm to Eay in the Grim Dark fan base. So, I if I'm a Hell Divers 2 player and I don't see anything worth playing for in Eay, then I'm What makes me going to what's going to make me come over and buy the game for that mode if I'm already playing mode?
Yeah, I think it's a little bit risky just from like an IP perspective like players who enjoy gears, what are their expectations? And I think a lot of them would expect PvP. Maybe in the long run, maybe like their live service model is going to be more focused on the horn mode PVE side, but I think at launch at least you kind of sat need to satisfy what the Gears players would want just to get the base installs of that audience and then to either expand out of that. I wasn't able to play the beta,

but I do think that they are they're trying something different in their kind of hill divers mode with it being like three teams or some collaboration going on. I think the thing it'll come down to is what does the meta progression look like? like what are you actually extracting with? How is that impacting your gameplay? What are those kind of more RPG elements? And that's kind of where maybe live service can take into place too. This is kind of one of these things about these old IPs is that like players just have expectations about them and and if you don't hit those expectations, you put a lot of risk on like initial sales. I think that's really fair, Chris. I would say I the thing I think they got wrong with the RPG cards. First of all, I think the design was wrong, but they represented them as cards and it was totally immersionbreaking. Like I'm playing Gears of War and I have cards. Like it just didn't feel like something that matched my expectations for the product. It's not what their world allowed for. And I I hope they can get a little bit more clever with this one.
I think to run a live service with the focus of PvE P versus PVE also requires

very different strategies. Uh, I guess cuz I'm with Chris sides on this, like they there's expectations from the players of this franchise to have PvP and I'm guessing those players are going to end up the to be the players that retain more unless you from the beginning of the game you launch with a focus on PvE live service. I don't think you'll be able to maintain a life service for PB and PVP unless you're really ready for that content treadmill and you have a lot of resources to support that. Usually with PVE life services that are like around horde modes, you end up selling DLC packs or you end up selling something that's equivalent of that. And this is why Hell Dive is quite fascinating, right? Because they do sell these war pots. They found their way to have DLC packs without actually selling them as DLC. They're being sold as war bonds, most of them. I think maybe all of them are with endgame currency, which is fascinating. But that also

easily works to sell gameplay in that way if you're only focused on PvE. So, if you're trying to, let's say, Hell Divers goes and decides to be PvP as well, and you sell War Bonds that has gameplay content in that way, then [ __ ] will hit the fan really, really, really fast. So, taking that war bond model, applying it to a live server that that has PVE and PVP, then you need to be careful with it. It's doable totally, and I think it's actually a smart thing to do, but then you can't sell gameplay in those war bones anymore. So with this game, I don't know what the guys are planning to do, but it's going to be a decision they need to make into how they want to run their live service and where what do they want to focus cuz they can't really do both. If they're focusing on PVE for the live server, then PvP most probably need to have all the content unlocked. Then maybe they have cosmetic chases, etc. Again, difficult. Then the second thing that this game is facing is I think if I remember correctly, it's launching October this year. That is a busy busy

busy window. like usually you're already busy without anything and you have GTA, you have the new Call of Duty. We don't know even what the other shooters are planning to re-engage users after they went and played GTA, but you know, you have to release your game at some point. So, I'm sure they had the reasons, but it's a very busy window. So I'm I'm not sure how the live show is going to kick off as well for these guys in sickness and in health in soft launch and in live ops through every meta shift and every platform policy change. That's the kind of loyalty vibes built between your game and your players. AI powered targeting, a real meta layer rorowass optimization that actually compounds. That's what makes Vibes the fastest growing loyalty platform in mobile games. Till churn do us a part. Vibes. Vybs.co. [music]

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Eiffel Tower, [music] iconic, Tower of London, historic. The two towers simply epic. But none of them tell you anything about mobile app intelligence, downloads, [music] revenue, active users, and my personal favorite, weekly cohorted retention. Get the real story, get the real data, get Sensor Tower today. One thing I want to cover to close out the episode is a bundle of battle pass changes. So, you have Call of Duty, which is introducing perma boosts based on the number of seasonal battle passes you get to the amount of XP you earn through player progression and weapon XP. You have what we are looking at here, which is a new way that Overwatch

is managing their battle pass, which is that there'll be no changes to the amount of content, but instead you'll have these tracks that you can progress. A track is just a sequence of levels. And so, you're basically just choosing the order in which you can unlock your content in the battle pass. And then there's one final change which Battlefield has announced that content that is in the battle pass can appear in the store but on a blackout window of 3 months. So this is basically everything we've been talking about when it comes to battle pass. You have the idea of FOMO cratering little by little. So the idea that Battlefield is going to bring back content they that's the thing that helps maximize revenue for that content is getting it in front of as many eyeballs as possible especially since they have acquisition from RedSack. The problem with the battle pass design as we've talked about is if you join in the middle of a 3-month season your earning opportunity or value proposition is a lot different. And so

now you can essentially evaluate the pass based on how many different tracks they have. So, you know, if they have like, let's say, five tracks versus their initial 100 tiers, you know, I can just evaluate whether or not I want to get the things that are contained within that track as my evaluation proposition for the battle pass towards the end of the season, which I think is very interesting. The other thing that it it does though is it craters that menu, right? So, the thing I want that might be at tier 100 is something now I can get at tier 10. And so, are you putting engagement risk out there? And then I would just say the other one we just briefly talked about is the Call of Duty benefit that stacking multiple passes on top. The thing that I really want to drive home in all of these changes is that we still haven't solved the Arpoo problem we've talked about on this podcast on how to increase the modernization of a lot of Western first person shooters. I think Battlefield in particular struggles with this. That's my biggest concern for us is that it can't support a live service cuz its marginal arpoo just isn't there. And I [clears throat] would say the same thing for Overwatch.

I think it struggles with this too. And the only monetization vector we really have in the west is the battle pass, which is why we keep touching it. Like we used like to say on the main Twig podcast that new platforms are new opportunities for growth. But to me like new genre expectations are new opportunities for monetization. You know, we talked about insurance with inside of DMZ was a new monetization vector that Call of Duty was like starting to experiment with. What is the line of like, hey, you know, maybe there's some gear prevention loss, you know, maybe there's some streak prevention. And I I fear for us because I think what people fail to understand is that monetization is also what employs us and like helps the sector grow. And so if we aren't able to attach like significant arpoo to these titles, then we can't support healthy live service teams. So, I know what is this? This is a plea. This is a plea for more monetization services.
So, there's a lot to unpack with what you said. I'm going to be the boring person and say something that I think we've all said before. Battle passes are

not supposed to be used mainly for monetization. They're supposed to be an engagement tool. So, we just got that out of the way. I think everyone has
But no, but but hold on for us. But, but that's but see people now look at Hell Divers and you're it's to your point. It's a DLC pack that we now wrap in like this certain set of systems design.
Exactly. But uh war bonds are not battle passes. The battle pass is basically when it first came out and became very popular. This was just a a rebranding of seasonal progression. Basically, we found like a way of like, okay, let's rebrand seasonal progression. Let's call it the battle pass and then we can add a monetization layer to it. And what was interesting about this monetization layer is that if players buy the battle pass, they end up actually wanting to get the best value out of it. So they end up staying in the game. But at the end of the day, what defines a battle pass versus like a war bond versus other systems that we're saying in the game. The only difference is a battle pass is a seasonal progression that disappears

when the season is over. By the definition of a seasonal progression, war bonds are actually DLC packs because once they get released, they stay in the game. They're not tied with a specific season. Therefore, they're not really behaving like a battle pass or like a seasonal progression. And I think this is why by default the if the content stays in the game, you're increasing the player spend cap, but you're also not going with the soul of what the battle pass is supposed to deliver. So if you have such a thing where the content stays in the game then you need to find other methods to engage players on a seasonal perspective which again hell divers realize like it's a little bit mainly about the war bones as much as about doing the major orders and all the stuff they're doing on the bigger narrative piece that's their seasonal drive rather than the war bonds is the content that comes with it. The second thing that you mentioned is also very fascinating about seasonal progression design is when a battle pass is very interesting when a player comes in at

day one, but if they come in at the last week or the last two week of the season, the hypothesis was, well, if they really like the items, they're going to purchase them purchase the skips. But that's not the standard behavior you get, which is why player agency in battle passes and seasonal progression showed up. We were trying to solve for the players coming in late and they still have a chance to go in. The third thing and this is my conspiracy theory started by looking at Fortnite because we again went in benchmarking games all the time to design these things. Fortnite just kept changing the battle pass all the time. And here is my conspiracy theory. 90% of the reason of doing the change is for changes sake. I think when you have users staying in for a long long time, even if your system is doing good, they just need to change it for a while and if it's your biggest money maker, which usually it's not, the store is your biggest money maker, then it's fine because you're trying to find retention from other avenues, your revenue is coming from the store, the

seasonal progression system, again, because it's a progression system, you need to change it every now and then just to keep the players engaged. And I think that's what maybe some other shooters are missing. they're approaching it from this perspective, so they're too precious to it. But the only way for it to stay engaging is to actually change it around. And it's a bit risky cuz you lose players sometimes when they do it wrong. But I think that's the way for you to survive if your life services uh are very green.
This is a really keen insight cuz to your point like they don't tie seasonal progression of war bond. Like it isn't just like the FOMO mechanic cuz again like Halo Infinite has like the non-expiring battle passes, but it's explicitly not a part of their seasonal beat. Like when they do an ODST integration, that's not a part of the beat. And so that also lets them change the timets and the pace at which they release war bonds, they can do three a month, they can do one a month, they can do two a month. What is even a season when you think about it? So in games like COD, Battlefield, Fortnite, the season begins and ends when the battle pass is removed from the game. In Hell Divers, what is a season? It's when a

new arc drops, when a new trailer drops, it's when Hell Diver tells you it's a new season. It's not tied to the battle pass anymore. So their approach to live service is very different than anyone else. And I actually quite like their approach because they managed to redefine seasonality in the shooter space with a very small team. Because they're a small team, they had to do it cuz the other option is you go out, you do the same thing that all of these big games are doing and it's not going to work. So they said, "Okay, we're going to define our season. It lasts as long as the community decides, right? If the community wants to finish, this season will be tomorrow. If they stay in and they don't fulfill it, then it will take much longer. I think that's the play they did there. And I think that's quite smart.
Also worth noting for us, Hell Divers 2 is a fully premium, self-premium game. So that gives them some flexibility to call out their seasons versus if you're free to play game, you live and die.
And they don't discount they don't discount that frequently. I mean, obviously they're part of some sales,

but where the [ __ ] is Arc Raiders on this strategy? This is This is like the easiest playbook I've ever seen that's been gifted to art creators. Like they're all in Sweden for us. What are people not drinking enough together? Do
you know them?
Can you connect these people? Like do they not understand that like down the hall there's like this massive success that has all of their monetization answers?
I think you can't apply the same strategy to our creators. Again, extraction shooters suffer from retention challenges in a very very different way. I feel like extraction shooters has the inherent challenge of ask you as a player asking yourself why am I playing this game if everything I'm doing is to lose what of the content that I have. So, you need quite strong engagement systems that connect to that. But usually extraction shooters are premium games. So, they don't come with these free-to-play strong engagement systems. That's that's my take on the

extraction genre. I don't think you can take what hell is doing and apply it to art raisers and that would work. But I think even in the whole extraction genre overall once you find that hardcore set of players they engage but to maintain the bigger numbers maintain the majority of your audience you need a lot of these systems that I don't think are prevalent in the the genre drop.
I don't know if that was impart strategy was to like get one and run with it forever. I do like I do think it was a miss for sure as like an outsider but I don't know what like internally their goals are but I I agree with like everything Fas is saying here. I think something that we run into and like as western developers is this almost like necessity to not listen but like we are kind of owned by the Reddits and the Twitters of the world in a lot of the ways that we make design decisions. I don't think that we have the ability to stretch and test as much stuff as people do in the east which allows them to play around with modernization more to really figure out what is new. Battle passes

are accepted to like western players minds and so like we have to do everything within the context of a battle pass in order to not worry about the negative sentiment that'll that'll come from it. And I think there's fair arguments to be like are these negative sentiments actually that negatively impactful to like revenue in the business? I think it's a game-by-game basis. But I think that is really kind of the the strain and outside of the rising costs of western developers because like we're relatively entitled. We want really high salaries. Like there's all these other things tied to the downfall of western development. I do think one of them is just like our inability to really test out new modernization due to the fear and obedience that we have to the masses, the players. And to be fair like that maybe that's how it should work, right? Maybe that's how things should go. Like the players should have that much power and impact. I think that's kind of where we really don't really have any options to play with new monetization. So, we have to all keep it within this like battle pass context. And I think that's kind of why like I just kind of feel like the shooter space a little bit boring in most senses because people

want new stuff and then like you try something new and just [ __ ] on and then the next developer is like, "Hey, they got [ __ ] on so I don't want to try anything new." And it just like is the cycle that goes down and and we're kind of I think that's kind of what's led us to where we are with Western development. You know, quote unquote western development's dead. And I know I'm not like I'm only like the millionth person to say that, but I do think this is like one of the key issues is like we do not have a place to play with monetization unless you're like an unknown company that comes out and tries something, right? War bonds, I'm sure War Bonds, I'm sure that concept exists in another game before Hell Divers 2. It doesn't like immediate jump to my head, but you know, they were like they were not an EA or they were not an Activision when they did this War Bonds. So I I think that a lot of this comes from more unknown studios cuz I think also as western gamers we tie so much pressure to like the brand and IP, we like care so much and we hold like so many restrictions tied to like how we feel a brand is that has a huge impact. So when something like Hell Divers 2 comes out, Hell Divers one may have had like a

success. It may have had like an audience. I don't really know a lot, but Hell Divers 2 is obviously much more bigger or much larger. And they were able to try this war bond to an audience that, you know, they were a small team. They were in a crunch. They had to figure something out. And this is what they found out. Players didn't have expectations of what it meant to have a premium live service with these war bonds. And so, it was kind of a nice combination. I think recreating that is something that's really hard. I don't think it's something the AAA companies can actually do. It's got to come from somewhere else like double A or lower. And sides, I agree with you completely when you say as developers were like hesitant to really explore monetization side. Perhaps in a future episode, I would love to hear everyone's Frankenstein experiment of how to push that to the limit. If you were a dictator in a game, what monetization would you apply? What are the pros and what are the cons? I'm sure we have a lot of ideas, but I think I lean towards blacklisted, baby. Let's do it. Yeah. [ __ ] honest graded by Reddit. The thing is is like because Western developers because we

are so like afraid to do these things, we're afraid of the negative sentiments. We've allowed the eastern developers to come in and dominate us, right? Ginchin Impact could not have been made by EA, but it's a loot box gota mechanic game, but it's massive in the West.
Mhm.
And because we've been so scared in the West to like try any of these things, trust me, I've been in a billion conversations where it's like, hey, let's like this thing they're doing in the East is really sweet. We should try that here. and it just gets shut down cuz some creative director is like, "Oh, Reddit will be upset." Like that happens at every AAA company. And like that's what is driving like us to not have any new fun abilities, nothing fun to do while the East just dominates us cuz they get to do all types of stuff and then it eventually makes its way to the west as eastern developers and western development dies and you have all these layoffs. I just wish that AAA companies would just take that risk and like the people in charge who are making the decisions wouldn't be so worried about what Reddit's going to say because if they do say something and it does have a negative negative impact that does suck but if we don't do anything it also

sucks like but then we're like lose lose like we have to make a decision here and I just don't find any AAA company is making a decision. That's my rant. Sorry. Um, come back. Come back and next time we are going to be talking about War Dogs. It's a game you've heard us mention here. They're making a real play at Battlefield. They've got a lot of design innovations coming and we're going to be coming at you with a deep dive. We might even play amongst each other at some point. Maybe if we all get into the beta. Pre-order now. See you next week. Ch-ching. I don't know. Some gun sound effect. Uh, shooter shooter monthly episode 10 11 in the can.
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