Shooting for Success: Navigating the Ultra Competitive Shooter Genre

[Music] hello my name is Adam Telfer welcome to the deconstructor of fun deep dive podcast today we have a big topic we're going to be going deep on what's been really on our minds for a while now what's been going on in the PC console shooter space we've seen a lot of big launches we've read a lot of headlines it feels like the shooter space has become this kind of precarious red ocean um and we've seen games like ex toi final Spectre divide now all struggling and launch despite despite a really high pedigree of teams um so wanted to bring together a panel of experts to kind of talk through what's the market what's happening with the market is it really that Bleak or is there a lot of opportunity here so the panel um let's do some quick intros um Devon would you be able to introduce yourself first yeah for sure super excited to be back on the doof podcast hopefully continue my trend of marginal optimism um but uh lovely to

meet you all I'm a senior consultant uh at nuu spent the better part of the last four years working with different game developers and Publishers across the globe mostly on data nerdy stuff uh like forecasting and Commercial strategy uh before that I was a boring consultant at deoe and then before that I was pursuing a startup in the game Space great and Chris let's get into you uh my name's Chris S it's my first time on this podcast so I'm very excited um yeah I've been in the industry for about 15 years started writing articles for mmorpg.com many years ago uh and then I went to EA where I was there for nine years working in free-to-play Mobile the last like my last three-year stint there was leading the product team on Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes uh and then I spent the last four years at Bungie as director of product on marathon and then very recently i' I left Bungie to start up my own uh Consulting so I've been doing that as of late only been doing it for a couple months so still building everything up but it's been been very exciting

do you have like a Consulting catchphrase yet uh no other than it's 8 a. and I'm awake that's that's my consult like what am I doing that's Cate and do we need to intro you Phil do we need to spend some time with you Phil uh I'm Phil I'm the host of the game Economist cast it's the number one game Economist podcast uh you can find me on LinkedIn and uh this other one called twig but no one listens to that no one listens to that no that's why we need to do this pod yeah okay so let's get into the shooter genre so Devon would you be able to take us take us away with some data here in terms of looking at the PC console shooter space yeah so first off one perspective that I think is really interesting when we're talking about the shooters is trying to understand how many folks are actually engaging within the shooter genre like how many people on a monthly basis are actually playing these different Shooters um so we've built two different segments here because we wanted to take two different perspectives one looking at people who

are playing PVP Centric firstperson Shooters and then compare that to more PVE Centric Shooters so a PVP shooter like ballerin or a PVE Centric shooter like say Destiny or Hell divers and so we found a couple different quite interesting things when we looked at sort of how many players are actually engaging Within These SE segments uh for the PVP firstperson Shooters we've seen uh going back to January 2021 there's a roughly 80 million players D duplicated monthly active users within uh this segment of the market and when I say duplicated monthly active users what that means is there's around 80 million players playing at least one of these types of titles within that month they could also be playing multiple titles within that month as well however when we've looked at how that's changed over the last 3 years we've seen a fairly strong decline in

the overall engagement uh within PVP firstperson Shooters so it's dropped from roughly 80 million going back to January 2021 to around 50 million just under 50 million in uh July of 20124 this year so that's roughly a uh 40% decline now to give some context here we've actually seen the overall games market across PC PlayStation and Xbox has declined in general regardless of genre around 28% over this three-year period so these specific segments uh the PVP first person shooters are underperforming against the broader Market uh as a whole and even when you tease this apart we can see some interesting things so if we pull apart PVP firstperson Shooters into tactical Shooters and arcade Shooters so tactical Shooters would be like valerant csgo Rainbow Six Siege and arcade Shooters would be Modern Warfare fa uh or Apex

Legends uh the Tactical Shooters are only down 32% over these three years whereas the arcade Shooters are down 45% so a significant chunk of what's driving down uh this decrease in the overall size is really the arcade Shooters and then we can contrast that to the more PP Centric Shooters which have actually been fairly uh steady in their overall Market size over these last three years so they were around roughly 12 million going back to January uh 2021 and actually in uh July of 2024 they're up 18% over these last three years at around 18 million now that's partly cheating because we've had once human and first ascendant uh launch uh in July and so that's boosting the overall size of these numbers but still from a percentage uh change over the last three years the PVE shooter side of the market is outper performing the more

PVP Centric uh firstperson Shooters so in terms of this data um like the arcade section declining so much what games are included there does that include like fortnite and Apex so I've kept fortnite kind of specifically out of this analysis it's quite a significant game it also is a bit more than a shooter nowadays even though most of the engagement within that game is still within the Battle Royale side of things uh what really is dropped causing the decline that we're seeing here uh is titles like uh early days Call of Duty going back to January 2021 Black Ops was massive uh back in January 2021 and a lot of that engagement within those Call of Duty titles outside of specifically war zone have largely disappeared over these last three years um so that's where we're seeing a pretty significant decline uh in this overall segment other titles like say Vanguard and

um more recent Call of Duty entrance have not performed as well as they were performing back during uh the co period um so that's part of why we're seeing a fairly strong decline but there've been very several other titles Apex Legends is the big one here that has experienced a fairly steady uh decline in engagement over these last three years as well I'm just surprised like if you go back to the graph that shows that PVP Decline and where those spikes are coming from like Modern Warfare 2 is a mass massive game during this period of time um OverWatch 2 obviously um had a huge Spike um but we're still looking at that like precipitous decline over time um of that larger audience um so why why do you think that is I think part of it is during covid and it's good to highlight here that this is the starting point is January 2021 this really was the peak of the covid lockdown period um so arcade Shooters are obviously going to track a more casual audience especially compar compared to uh say tactical Shooters so

it's not a huge surprise that that is the segment in which we're seeing a fairly strong drop off coming out of the covid uh years I think a large impact is we saw a lot of players casual players come in during covid they gravitated towards the more casual arcade shooter Styles and we've seen a lot of those casual players either reduce their engagement within games or just completely uh leave games uh over the last three years as well and you you mentioned the the like 40% Decline and how it is relative to the whole to the whole market and it has to also be that I mean I would assume that this space overperformed compared to rest of the market during the co era just because it is so easy like I mean everybody's playing this everybody's playing Cod or fortnite or whatever while they're at home with their friends and so I imagine that the over performance is just now being seen larger at with the underperformance yes yeah exactly unfortunately our tracking data doesn't go back earlier than uh January 21 uh so

I can't uh give you as data confirmed uh of an answer on this particular topic but that is our hypothesis uh as well based on other data that we've seen okay so you're saying is is the rate of decline slower or higher than the rest of the market over the same period so the rate of decline is higher within uh PVP firstperson Shooters uh because this is insane we're saying it went from 80 to 50 million I mean that's a massacre why is this not front page news this is like the FPS Massacre just happened over the last two years I mean I again it part of it is because of the the starting point here is going back to the covid the high engagement period as well so it's tough to say if it it would be interesting unfortunately if we could compare to say before covid like are we at below uh pre-co levels or have we just uh renormalized uh to preo impact um I think that's an important question unfortunately it's not one we can uh answer simply with the data we have in

and so your argument is still that just Call of Duty isn't sticky and that's what's driving a lot of this because Call of Duty is such a big share of this ma but war zone seems fine war zone has been resilient to this decline in Arena yeah so war zone has been fine uh but it was other titles like uh Black Ops was massive uh it just released in November of 2020 and it was absolutely massive during uh it was almost on par with uh war zone at that period in time in terms of engagements and and the the out the game Call of Duty games outside of War Zone have mostly evaporated as far as engagement goes uh and recent terms but that's including Modern Warfare 2 which was a pretty massive launch yeah so so Modern Warfare 2 of course uh wraps into war zone now so we can't uh tease apart uh what is war zone and what is Modern Warfare 2 but still the collective say Modern War Zone plus Black Ops uh in January 2021 uh is larger than what uh

war zone 2 is now in terms of Engagement you've heard of heroic laps by now and we keep talking about them because you need every Edge to be successful in today's market heroic Labs gam stack is built like a break house you got the Nama their back-end game server hero their game development framework sator their liveop service and last but not least heroic Cloud to provide massive scalability heroic Labs is a battle tested partner and their Tech enables you to be flexible creative and scale for Success focus on your game avoid Tech risks grow your product with scalable liveops and save a big chunk of cheese all with heroic Labs interesting and when we're looking at this decline like I'm I'm trying to map this to like the headlines that we've also been hearing so for example we look at that list of um titles that

are Elder games that are still running um like valerant they just announced what was it 35 million ma um at the unite conference or the unreal conference was it unreal sorry what was what was the conference they announced it at what was the thing oh I don't remember announ that one uh the riot F was it the riot the finals thing the finals no we got to cut this whole thing no [ __ ] idea valer just announced 35 million ma um which obviously is a massive with their launch an Xbox so it was post their console release yeah okay yep um so wondering like that precipitous decline when we're also hearing stories of things like valerant succeeding Modern Warfare 3 was not a huge success two was a success and then same thing on um uh same thing for fortnite fortnite had a huge uh

Resurgence coming in last last fall obviously that's not within the data set here but um is there any with that precipitous decline like what else could be driving it given that those other games seem to be spiking pretty pretty large amounts of the player base over I mean my my kind of hypothesis is that s like valerant is the last kind of like last Harrah of large FPS titles that has occurred in The Last 5 Years years it's it launched in 2020 like summer of 2020 and since then you know we've had Halo Halo infinite came out uh Battlefield you know 2142 or 2042 and then you had OverWatch 2 come out and all of those kind of spiked and dropped um and so nothing's really stayed consistent since valerent so I like part of me just kind of feels that you know we hit the we hit the mark of the massive titles and we are now you know receiving the decline from postco

and now you're having much more smaller entrance come into the market that just aren't making a dent you know once human is doing fine but I mean relative to these monsters it's it's it's a rounding air um and so it it I I think that there's something there where the the space is becoming so saturated that these large breakout FPS titles just don't exist anymore what do you make of the term black hole game I've seen this thrown around more and more I've I haven't heard of that I haven't heard that term just they they suck up all the new entrance around them they suck up all the play time they have gravity that do these first shoter GES are black holees I think that yeah I do I think for a few reasons I think one like we we talked about this a lot when working on on marathon and stuff is that we feel that you almost have to like divorce players from games to come over to your game within the FPS space and that is a mass that's very expensive to do from a marketing standpoint and then once they're in there you got to keep them and so you have to kind of take friend groups to games rather than just like individual players and I think that a

lot of these games that you know players kind of have they they kind of go play their one game and they go back to their like Buddy game with like fortnite or Cod or whatever they're playing so they kind of jump out play their Elden ring and then come back to these mainstream FPS titles so I do think that the like I mean Call of Duty Apex has had a rough decline but so I'm not fully sure but fortnite um especially with all the creative stuff like these are just sucking up the market and it's becoming extremely challenging to grab players like it feels like we're going to what mobile was in like 2015 just insanely saturated you had very successful games but very small da games with just High you know arpo um I feel like that's where the FBI space is moving and doubling in on the Apex decline like my other sense here is like Apex has been declining since 2021 it's been a more precipitous decline than other franchises in terms of like live operations in terms of what games are offering on a seasonal or vent side basis is there any signs here that

Shooters in that model of like four seasons four battle passes and events sprinkled out is that model breaking down here I I think so for sure I I believe that games that are coming out they're they're being forced you know they're they're pushing themselves to launch which is very difficult and then players are expecting you know very quick updates posted and I just don't think that the game being released can are either expecting that or can sustain that and like when you think about a a season of 3 months like when you see it on a Excel spread sheet and you build out a road map it feels okay but as a player playing it 3 months is a lifetime like three months like who knows what the market will look like in three months from now and so I still think that the AAA space for FPS titles is still focused on these like broader time Horizons while players are wanting it on shorter time Horizons that developers have yet learned how to fulfill

so we've seen things like valerant and OverWatch start to um pull in that seasonal time right into those two Monon periods but in the case of OverWatch 2 you have a game that then had to sacrifice Heroes right right that they they had to kind of now go to a hero every four months instead of a hero every two months are those the right types of tradeoffs that teams have to make in order to hit a faster Cadence of seasonal updates but then sacrif those tent pole content or is it like hey you kind of have to have both you have to have these massive tent poles every two months or or faster if you want to compete I think you need to have both but I also think that an issue I think that a lot of games run into in life Services is that they make players care about the things that are most difficult to build and so like within the OverWatch example it's like okay Heroes players really care about that but they're very difficult to build and so you only get one every four months and I mean four months is just like that's way too to long so if you have a game like

you know first descendant although it's not performing well it is very systematic and so you can actually alter the systems which are easier to deal with from a Dev perspective and players really care about so I think that there's kind of this overlap right now of what does marketing need to market the new update in season which is something like a hero or a new map or a raid in Destiny or whatever which are very complicated and very expensive things to do and you just can't do it quick enough within these live services so I think it's both but I also think there needs to be a more like systematic way that first-person live shoot live services are looking at how they manage player engagement I just don't think that we're there yet right now this is one of the things that I work on clients with sometimes is really thinking about the productivity of content and how different game Loops enhance or decline certain pieces of content so we can think about like for every unit of Labor you know you're you spend making a gun you know how many hours of gameplay or how many hours of retention does that gun drive me and I don't think that's the under every single rule structure

and so like how can you think about a rule structure that maximizes content the value of content what are things that you can like that you know one of the things we sometimes talk about is emerging gameplay you know what are ways that players can kind of create their own outcomes um from things that developers didn't intend which is why the final sometimes confuses me like there's a lot of these games that I thought would win would win on that but just haven't been able to shake it but let me let me ask you one other thing Chris because this was this is driving me crazy as you were speaking speaking what about what about the Chinese mobile games the Chinese mobile firsters Shooters pubg mobile um there there's there's a b there's a huge swath of them do you think they do the right things in terms of content production like this is what we should be looking towards in HD is how Chinese mobile first person shooters deliver I do I mean I do think that taking from the mobile standard is going to be more needed within the AAA space I think it's really challenging because of the platform like people are like oh people aren't playing on their computers every day or playing on their console every day but I think that that is kind of changing I do think that

there is a lot from mobile that should be pulled over to the FP aleaa FPS space and I just don't think that like Western AAA developers have really grasp that um so yeah I definitely think that a lot of the I would take inspiration from any of those games but I also think pubg is it's pubg is a little bit Chu because it's it is there's a lot of intrinsic reward tied to battle royal and so you you kind of get away with some things um compared to something like a destiny which is very much content driven and the only reason I poke that is because it feels like even their pipelines are mostly cosmetic and intuitively like I I I totally agree with you that like you want to build the content that is most productive that's retentive so if you're OverWatch you want to build Heroes right but the thing that you chose takes four months to build sometimes I look at these Chinese games and you know when I work with a lot of HD developers I mean old school HD developers like when I walk into Dice and where I think a lot of mobile people sometimes walk into these old Studios the reason Cosmetics win is because it

doesn't have to touch the core Loop right you can you can airdrop Cosmetics into anything right you you just slap it on and I think I've seen HD developers resilient to make gameplay affecting items a part of the core Loop even just power progression whether or not it's related to monetization or not they they just sometimes seem afraid to do that in a PVP setting I don't know if you've seen something similar I mean I do I do tend to agree you know I I I work um for sure with more like traditional or not traditional but kind of more old school devs and I still think I think it's really challenging to if you if you've never experienced the mobile world to try to learn how to build within it it's confusing I can understand why it's very challenging to get there but that is just the D in my opinion that is the direction the market is going and so either there's going to be some small Indie company that figures it out and AAA devs then then build upon it from there or uh we just continue to see you know hundreds of millions of dollars

burnt as we continue to like try to release these FPS titles into the market okay then let's transition in terms of looking from existing Elder games and their performance and let's start looking into who has attempted to break into this space the new games that have come in um so Devon would you be able to set up this data that we're looking at here in terms of Dow from launch this podcast is brought to you by appsflyer in today's Digital World understanding your apps Journey from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential enter apps lier the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar work smarter with apps flyer that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where your users come from and how they'll interact with your app apps sler where your app's potential meets

performance yeah for sure I'm going to fail my objective of being marginally optimistic uh in this part so I apologize um but what we're looking at here is uh where possible the first 90 days uh daily active user curve of these different titles uh the ones that have recently launched like ex defant we're just looking at console here because they made a decision to go with their own Ubisoft launcher uh on PC um but then also titles like the final Spectra divide uh and then benchmarking those against OverWatch 2's launch Halo infinite and Battlefield 2042 um and then we've also looked at kind of how does that look from a percentage of peak da uh to control for the difference in absolutes of these different titles generally speaking across the board it is not a pretty picture uh for most of these titles by the time they reach uh day 90 they're below 20% uh of the their Peak da uh

OverWatch and then valerent uh recent console launch are really the two titles in here that have been outperforming the rest uh of the set OverWatch is a bit of a cheat uh because it was more of a transitionary period rather than kind of a true traditional launch uh as far as kind of its retention of players from its launch um but as we can see pretty much regardless of the game style uh be it arcade or tactical these all these new entrances are struggling incredibly to uh hold on to the audiences that they briefly uh get to the tri out their title and I know it's relatively new but there was also the game off the grid that just recently released it's not on the on the graph here but how has that performance been going thought you were going to say it's not on the grid uh you missed missed an opportunity there missed an opportunity where's the dad jokes uh yeah so I I can touch on off the GR a little bit as well uh of course the data

here is is quite fresh uh but the initial signs are not super positive so few different things here looking specifically at the PlayStation ecosystem for Off the Grid uh their day 10 Dow is at roughly 75% of uh Peak Dow uh so that's tracking below both the finals and ex defiant Within PlayStation um so that's not great and then also from a viewership perspective uh by day 12 of viewership they're now down to 6% of the peak hour's watch day uh which compared to finals was at around 60% on the same day post launch and exiant was about 20% on the same day so both from an engagement perspective uh like an actual engagement and then from a viewership perspective uh the initial signs uh are not great uh for off the GD at the moment okay so Phil what's the clickbait title here let's get into for the recent performance of new PVP

FPS titles let's get into this yeah what's the what's the real clickbait clickit title um Arena Shooters what is dead may never die I mean like this I mean Arena Shooters are a category that you keep I mean it's almost as Eric Eric might call it it's the mobas of first-person shooters you know people just keep trying for no apparent reason they keep failing and they keep trying again uh very confusing to see that attempted over and over again Halo infinite way down that doesn't look good um you know we're talking about X defyant that doesn't look good it it feels like business model I guess this is other thing I've been wanting to talk about it feels like business model is not a beach head I thought it might be a beach head at one point but there's so much conversation I have with Studios that I'm sure we all have free to play or paid I feel like it's just a distraction I feel like it's it's a short run a short run decision and ultimately like the game has underlying kpis that in the long long run are going to determine its success

and I have a hard time imagining that a lot of these games have diverging Fates based on whether or not they chose freeo playay or paid you have some thoughts yeah I mean I agree I mean one I'm a I'm a paid guy now you know even though I worked in in freeo play for so long I'm become a paid guy um but I mean no I I I do agree that the underly like the at the end of the day the free-to-play product or paid product is what's going to make the long run of it I think that reason why people talk about paid a lot is just payback schedules I mean games are becoming so expensive so you do paid you at least get some upfront Revenue guaranteed and you can discuss from there and nowadays like paid titles and free-to-play monetization are just the same you know every game is is just merging them together and so you can still get away with doing free-to-play type monetization um but I do I do think that games that are coming out as free to play or paid is that even if they're not having a large install bump at the at the launch it just I think that's just pure Market saturation I still think

that their live Services just are bad like I have I've played so many of these new titles that come out and I feel like their their live service sucks it's like okay next week something happens but like a week in Arena Shooters another another Arena Shooters out like in a week so it's like they need to I always talked about like the first three months of launch needs to be unsustainable from a Dev perspective in order to have any chance at like long-term success essentially you have to like I mean back in the day leue of Legends did this where they released a new hero every week you know that was their launch strategy and that was part of you know obviously there was a bunch of reasons why it was successful but one of the things was is that they released that every week which was crazy for that time period um and so it's like how do you do that in the shooter space for that first even maybe one month how do you just keep players there for that first one month so that maybe they become somewhat attached and will stay around I just don't think any of these games have figured it out who do you think has done that has are there any examples I mean I

I don't think that the market has ever had to do this and so I can't think of ones specifically that have done done this on purpose um like if you look back I mean pubg to fortnite to then Apex war zone valerant like all of those games didn't really do it but I don't think they had to at the time I think right now you have to because those monsters they didn't exist when they released you know but now they're the they're the black holes you know so you have to pull them out in some fashion and I just don't think any I don't think that either any Dev team is thinking about it or they've already like because Dev takes so long you've already made the decision and committed that reverting that change would just be catastrophic from a Dev perspective and so like we're in this window here of like maybe two to three years where we're learning all of this stuff and then now in maybe two to three years the games that are development now will solve that problem so so would it be fair to to say like you think there's a supply side problem that new games are facing

they're like they're not they're not walking up to the shooting range with enough bullets yeah yeah absolutely I mean I think that full magazines I guess I really going FPS analogy here yeah right um yeah I just don't I just think that the games are launching like I mean I I'll be really interested in Marvel Rivals I think Marvel Rivals will get away with some stuff because it is Marvel but it's just a hero shooter you know and it's like even from a marketing standpoint it looks like other hero Shooters and so I think that because it's Marvel it'll it'll be able to cheat kind of have a cheat code to some things but you know you look at something like Concord and it kind of has all that same area and you play it and it just like lacks this kind of like depth to it it's like I've already I've played Team Fortress 2 for 20 years and I played OverWatch for 10 it's like I need something else here um and I just don't think that Dev teams are looking at it I think they're looking at the base launch product as like the thing that'll keep players and my argument is that that is not what keeps players anymore but to counter that

like Concord and finals are we saying that the main reason why they failed was because they didn't come with enough live content aggressively at launch like Concord could have sorry I know Concord is an extreme example but in the case of like finals if they were able to launch new maps new modes um new abilities on a much faster Cadence within that first month that it would have fixed that trajectory that they had I I I don't know I wouldn't say that it would necessarily fix I would say that it would have improved their odds of making it further and I think that's really the the hard thing is that like there is no like oh you just do this and you win um it's more like I think I look at all of the changes to the market is just like increasing your percent chance to win but it's never ever going to be you know above yeah 40% you know like it's never going to be super high um I'm just thinking of like the balance between see like Mastery curve like core

Core Shooting mechanics and Mastery curve on a finals and if they had improved that if the game just had a significant more amount of depth at launch versus loading up with a significant more content because I think in the content piece you're now asking that team to add another Dev year right with all the burn rate of of that cost add that to the p&l and say let's add that risk to it but then is the issue the Mastery curve or is the issue they just didn't have enough new content coming out I mean I think it's I I definitely do think Mastery will play a pretty big part in kind of the like intrinsic motivation that leads to engagements um so I do think that that is a like for sure a good thing to have I think I have this like later in the dock but I think kind of my My overall argument is that when you look at the games that have like really long like massive longevity is that they're very high Mastery or very intrinsically rewarding and I think that that is is a very hard thing to bank a game on because it's very hard to

prove um and so the kind of counter to that is like well if you want to hedge your bets against intrinsic motivation you add extrinsic motivation so you add all like the rewards and the content on the other side and and my argument is like you need to have both in order to have a chance um and I don't think that we've yet found like I don't think that any game really in the last four to five years has really found that balance at least at a large scale absolutely and Devin you you brought some data here in terms of how players actually migrated in terms of in and out when these franchises started to launch any insights here yeah it's probably not going to be a shock uh to anyone when you're seeing this data um but some of the things we looked at for both the finals and next Defiance is in their launch months uh where were the players that started playing those games coming from so what was the titles that they playing in the prior month before launch that they stopped playing and then

started playing say the finals for so for the finals roughly 46% of those new players who started in playing that first month were playing fortnite in the prior month so November uh before they launched in December another 36% of those players are playing counter- strike 2 uh 15% playing Cod um and we also index these numbers so obviously there's a a laot of big numbers at play here fortnite isn't absolutely massive game so when you're talking about overlap it's always going to have a high overlap uh with many titles uh but even from an index score um the finals and fortnite was high as well so there's a higher level of overlap than what we would expect uh between these two titles and then when we looked at what happened in the second month so for the finals specifically uh around 23s of the players who played in the first month of launch did not play in the second month and of those 2/3 of players 50% of them

were playing fortnite uh in that second month another 30% had gone back to C us2 uh 20% to Cod um so what we're seeing here is gravitational poll yeah to Bill's Point black hole of fortnite's uh really is these players have their live service title they're taking a vacation to try out the new shooter on the market they've decided that new shooter is not for them and they've returned to their live Ser live service shooter uh that they were playing beforehand and then in the case of exif find here you like is is the is the right strategy here to get the [ __ ] away from fortnite like is to like build your game so that it's the least fortnite audience possible I mean exif fight kind of defined itself as everything Call of Duty was 10 years ago um and ouch so the over in the the acquisition data

so fortnite was the largest title for the finals in contrast ex defiant roughly 40% of the players who started playing ex defiant in the first month were playing Call of Duty in the prior month and then those players who turned in the follow on month roughly 41% of them went back to play Call of Duty I mean they're Mir they're mired on both distributions same in same out yeah yeah exactly I mean it's actually astonishing how how closely married they are yeah but but is that is that crazy to you like it do people go through exy and then all of a sudden change their idea of what shooter they want to go to they go back to their side partner right they they date around for a little bit they do a little speed dating and they're like you know I like what I got at home to continue with the with the romance you know scenario is that you the the I've always talked about like you have to almost love bomb players that's what I talk about like the the the the uh um the uh unsustainability of launch it's like you have to love bomb them and then you know hopefully they

stay hopefully they stay hopefully they stay but then but then it's just about the the cost of that and like thinking through the is there any tricks you can play in terms of your live model so that you can have high efficiency content versus other players in the market that's tough okay um beyond that what are the other barriers then for PVP Shooters yeah so I I have a couple different hypothesis and curious to hear everyone else thoughts on these um I think the the biggest barriers for these new entrances the first is the limited uh growth of the market we're seeing that we discussed at the start of this podcast the new entrances are not growing The Tam of how many players are engaging with this in space so that means you're directly stealing you're directly tying to take uh these players from these existing uh FPS titles in the markets um and then I think at that point you hit some pretty high uh switching costs uh for those players so uh my opinion and I'll give a shout out to I think Ryan Ry who's head of marketing at Odyssey interactive who

wrote an article on some of this uh but a couple of different of those switching costs are things like builtup skill and rank within a title so people who invested thousands of dollars into valerant and have really perfected their understanding of the maps and the spoke angles and all that kind of stuff and then trying to convince them to play Spectra divide and become a pleb again and rebuild up uh that skill like that that is a barrier that you need to convince them to do I think Chris you already mentioned the friend groups you don't just have to convince one player you have to convince all of their friends to switch over to that game that's a barrier of course investment in microtransactions and skins in the games and then also infrastructure outside of the game like uh Esports that are built around the titles that you like to follow the Reddit communities that you engage in the Discord communities uh that you engage in those things that give you kind of a sense of community outside of the game itself where maybe you've built a name for yourself or your screen name or engaging in those areas uh those are again uh High barriers uh

that you have to overcome as a new entrance trying to steal those players from these titles so we've I feel like we've gone pretty cynical with this now pretty pessimistic in terms of the the bar in order to compete as a PVP shooter here um diving into like limited player growth and you go back to that D duplicated Mal curve what's is the right strategy here to try to break that curve is to start to find ways to appeal to a broader audience or is it to double down on the existing audience and find that Niche and own it in terms of be the Super tactical shooter hyper realistic shooter but then be able to own that market I'm just thinking of like what what are the ways that a developer can break this model because I I guess I'm I agree with the pessimism but at the same time what the market has shown us for the last decades has always been that people

find blue spots and red oceans so I'm trying to figure out like what's the right approach I you know I do agree that Niche smaller smaller Dau Niche dedicated audiences within the FPS space is going to be I I mean that was a that would be a strategy I would take the kind of problem is that that doesn't get you funding you know to be like hey we're going to be a 10,000 you know da game but they're really engaged like that doesn't get you know the the budget and so I think that's kind of what is at odds right now within within at least the Triple A Space um but I look at it uh as I I I look at it as like mobile RPGs you know maybe eight years ago or so it was like you had your Summoners War and you had Hero's charge which were massive you know mobile RPG titles and then you had your Marvel strike forces and your Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes that were very small from a like user standpoint especially on mobile but they

made you know2 $300 million a year because they had such a dedicated audience and and that's because the RPG space on mobile is just insanely saturated I mean way further than within what the shooter space is right now but that's where that's what I would go towards is a niche audience it hits exactly what they want almost like a tarov in a way where like that audience loves tarov and that's all they play um uh but yeah that that I just don't know how you have these breakout hits anymore I mean one will occur but to predicted is is going to be impossible yeah I just think what are your expectations when you come into this Market uh I think for companies with smaller expectations there are success stories there's titles like battle bit remaster that came in uh and did quite well uh obviously a much smaller game much smaller scope of expectations for Success titles like hell let loose from Team 17 uh enlisted from gun entertainment uh Insurgency stand storm I think you already have a there but I I think like the theme is like they they had a very more

particular thesis like I always go back to like coonan Paradigm Cycles you know when we think about the evolution of FPS it starts in a particular genre then there's usually some sort of innovation they split off they do their own thing some sometimes it's Innovation Within game design sometimes it's a technological requirement like we had Arena shooters that kind of got split off we ended up having tactical Shooters it's not like Arena Shooters died but clearly tactical shooters were doing things that Arena Shooters couldn't sometimes sometimes ARA Shooters can incorporate sometimes they can't and then what you split off and you get large scale shooters then when you split off you get mooba and then you get BR and there's been kind of like this question about what what comes next because I think one of the things that we've been poking at is so many of these genres feel fleshed out that what you're going up against is something that's very well defined and very hard to innovate against like a lot a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked um you know it's very hard to do what Apex did it was a it was a late Comer it came with a ton of core gameplay Innovations and to your point Chris it didn't have all the supply side stuff figured out if you remember that first battle pass

which oh yeah which I may D at the time yeah yep and I mean it took him it's taken them a really long time to get a hang of this I mean respawn was a disaster for a really long time and now they have like four or five Studios working working on the franchise so I think it's it it's hard as as we mentioned um but I think when you look at the subg genres there's a lot more activity that it's going on here that's really exciting and it's all trying to answer that question what comes after Battle Royale what's the next Evolution and I don't think that answer has been EXT action shooter we can how dare you we can debate that we can debate that marathon is the only one that's allowed um and I and there's there's been survival Shooters right that to me is the is the other the other Paradigm that's kind of poking around and I still think there's there's some interesting sub activity I mean you just point to it large scale Shooters like Battlefield Battlefield it breaks my heart man breaks my heart to say this but like the crown the Crown's hanging on the chair and the chair is empty you know and like who's who's going to take that that large scale crown and there's a lot of interesting competitors um it does not Bo well for VC backed firms though any of what we're saying in in my opinion it

it feels hard to pull this off um and say like we're going to have a billion dollar opportunity and go after a sub genre is not very exciting any further thoughts here come on tell tell me something about extraction shooter can anyone give a defense of extraction Shooters my my defense what needs to be solved here what needs to be solved with an extraction Shooters well I think that is this the answer to to Battle Royale is this lineage I don't know if it's the answer but I do think it's like an evolution of of the market um I I think it's like you you talk about like you'd have Ultima EverQuest like wow then you had you know King of the kill pubg fortnites and right now you have tarov and so like the the history would suggest that there will be some game that comes up up to make it you know more welln and then some game that will

dominate the market but I don't like I don't know if we the way that they are being built is really in that fashion at least in like maybe the the AAA space um there may be some smaller companies that will that will figure something out along the way but I do believe that somebody will solve extraction um it is very difficult I think that a lot of companies kind of ran with it and then backed away from it because they saw kind of what was happening you know you had the cycle come out which was kind of the first attempt as a non- tarov extraction shooter and it it did not do well at all I think it did it didn't do well for a lot of reasons not not just the fact that it was an extraction shooter um but I do believe that that is where we go to next if you can distill the core down of like what feels good about extractions is that what feels good in extraction Shooters is better than getting a victory Royale but how do you get that to like a broader audience is just everybody has a million ideas of how to do it and no one has really

solved it yet but I do believe it's where we are going do you think it's the exraction genre is inherently self-limiting in the fact that it's a higher anxiety uh mode of gameplay uh because part of me feels like it's just inherently a more a smaller Niche within say the Battle Royale genre given the nature of the gameplay of extraction you come in with loot that you can lose you gain loot throughout the experience that you can lose there's a ramping level of anxiety and is that a play experience that a broad Market of shooter players wants to have or is that a high intensity high anxiety that plays to a very core uh group of shooter players yeah I mean it's it's a great question and it's like the the debate of all debates it feels like within extraction um whatever you think of something like whenever you hear the argument like oh take tarov and make it broad audience what what often starts to come it's like okay well we're will remove this hardcore aspect we'll remove this hardcore aspect and you'll get to a

point where you remove the soul of the extraction shooter and what you are removing and what actually makes it feel like it does it's it's almost impossible to know which kind of Jenga piece you knocked down that destroyed you know the whole uh core of the game um and so I do think there is an argument to say that just the the the mere kind of perade nature of of a of an extraction shooter is just never going to be br I think that that's like a totally fair argument um but I think there are ways to have the anxiety of like wanting to extract with what you've just earned and that excitement that doesn't necessarily end in this binary win loss like you see in tarov um where you know if you go in you die it's you lost everything was kind of a waste of time whatever but I think there's like a middle ground there where you can still have some progression systems that move forward even whenever you are kind of losing um equipment in this kind of per death aspect I think there's a balance there it's like what what questions does

extraction Shooters answer for first person shooters players like if we think about it back in that Paradigm framework you know what what is this solve for um and I think Stakes is one of them you know have FPS players just been left behind when it comes to stakes and I think the other one that's been of Forgotten especially in the wake of Destiny 2 ironically enough has been out of round progression like you get to take your weapons outside of the round like I I think there was a lot a lot to be said for that that I think think HD developers in particular start with this this precept that like everyone has to be on the same playing field when you enter a match even though we know that's not really true like you can have horizontal progression some gam some guns are really better than others despite the fact like you want them to all be equal and be skill-based but like I do think there is a meta collection aspect that firstperson Shooters players want there is a power aspect that like that hasn't been served that I think battle royale's touched on because like they they are Rog likes right there's there's in round progression in a battle royale that I think it touches a lot of people and no one's no one's been able

to Ring to your point no one's been able to was it the ship atheist problem where like you keep exchanging like old planks from one ship to new planks to the other ship and which part which one is The Old Ship one is the new ship how many planks do I have to exchange like to your point no one's figured out what that is yet but I also think they're just chasing a really small number like escape from toov has never had impressive numbers it's never had a high Mau like usually what you have is you have some sort of like breakout that proves it like apex apex was going after two two games one was fortnite and fortnite went after pubg you know pubg was the most successful game on Steam ever in terms of CCU as a paid game ever ever it blows my mind when that number comes up but they you know they they were able to accomplish that um because they went after a big market and I think that's the problem I have with extraction Shooters is that they haven't proven that what they're going after is big I I mean I don't think that pubg went after a big Market I think pubg created the market well Daisy before that was still pretty big I mean that thing still sells Daisy still sells yeah I yeah the still still plays Battle

Royale was like a a mod for arm yeah I don't think the engagement was ever that big and and before that was King of the kill which I don't even remember if it was a mod or not but uh those the only ones that I knew before I'm sure there were plenty of battle Royals before but the ones that I can think of um I really feel like pubg was the one that that created the market um and I think that there's an argument I guess to be made that tarov also created the market and that's its size and I think that that is that's that's a fair I think that's a fair argument as well I have a little bit of Hope based on my my background and love for this genre um but I I I totally agree that that is that could be potentially just what it is because of the kind of gambling and risky aspect of it just inherently makes it a niche a niche title or a niche genre I will say to I like really like Phil's point the metagame aspect of extraction Shooters is massive and it's currently incredibly underserved like what does with their stash and U I can't remember what they call it in the game but it haido thank

you uh not a great system sorry about the state but uh it's very underwhelming and I think there's so much more space to like grow that metagame element of it incorporate more social aspects within that gameplay Loop and I think that's an area of innovation that can bring in help bring in a more broad audience within extraction shooters that has been really lacking within the new entrance for extraction and the and tar as well I totally agree on The Meta progression portion and I think that's where a lot of like extration shooters that have tried to to Market have failed I think the Cycles meta progression was garbage y um yeah so in the last five minutes here to kind of like wrap this up in terms of the PVP shooter space what do you think are the top three things that if you're a developer right now building a PVP shooter what are the three things you got to get right in order to break in like what's that bar look like everyone's going into zen mode do you

want me take a shot first do you mind if I take a I'll take a shot I'll give everyone time because I'm cook I'm ready for this I'm cooking on this one uh I think you got to Cho I think you got to choose an ambitious enough game thesis I have a certain process for game thesis um I think you need to in in part of that game thesis has to be has to be strong enough like I think what we've seen with splitgate 2 kind of these one gimmick games not enough enough not enough especially if you're going into an very established Market Arena Shooters which we've talked about where has been long established you're going after games that have really refine their mechanics and all you got to show me is a portal it's not enough I thought Spectre divide was enough to go into tactical Shooters to be honest with you I thought that integrated into the core Loop enough I thought that was going to open up enough strategic options the answer was no not not enough it's got to be it's got to even be a bigger thesis I don't I I actually disagree with Chris a little bit on the supply side issue I I think there are other ways you can kind of get creative with your design and think about like that productivity of content we were talking about I think I think there might be ways to solve it but I

guess what I would say is you know develop your game thesis and so what I mean by that is like what is the market told us have some sort of Market Insight whether it's a sub genre escape from tarov isn't big enough I don't know whatever it is like tell me that tell me how you're going to be the same or different I think that's the really important part like hedge your risk um tell me where your your risks are kind of like the Sid Meers a one third one third one third role I'm really big fan of that and for H developers the one I always have to put in that special is like what are your monetization hooks like you got it got to have an answer to that and like if you can't win on the supply side Cosmetics is rough it's a rough Choice uh I'll Echo that again yeah I I do I tend to agree with everything you said I do think that I think the supply side is like the the Hedge against the game and so that's kind of why I lean into it a lot um but I think that like the three things that I would look at just like more of a just a little bit more straightforward one of those is what you talked about I like is the vision of the game like finding the

vision and staying with it whenever you're developing it's like at the at Greenlight you have a vision and then you start developing and there's all a billion things that occur and like the vision will get lost and then you start making this just like generic game and it feels really sad I think the second is I don't know how new IPS work in this genre anymore um I think that like Marvel Rivals is the like out of all the hero Shooters Marvel Rivals would be the one that I would think has some longevity purely because it is Marvel and it already has that inherent thing I think new IPS coming into the market is just extremely challenging it's so expensive from a marketing standpoint it's so difficult to get people to care I I just don't know if new IP is even viable anymore within this space um using a similar thing to mobile it's like everything on mobile is IP based unless you're like supercell or spend hundreds of millions of dollars in UA um those are like the two options uh the third is the live service side I think that developers still will I've heard the argument so many times they'll say like we have to deprioritize live service to get to launch you have to

deprioritize these things to get to launch and I think that that mindset is incorrect there's still people that believe that like launch and grow is a viable strategy oh we'll launch it and we'll update it and it'll get better like that's just not how it works anymore like you're launch Rainbow Six Siege like everyone clings on to like the latest new shape that's like inspiring and I mean Rainbow Six Siege is inspiring but it's like that's not a strategy um and we'll be Warframe we'll be Warframe you always hear that one that one Path of Exile you'll yeah and so yeah there are games that have done this but it's like I just I don't believe I think that launch is launch and life service are no longer separate things to think about from a Dev standpoint sure you can develop them separately but like they are one and the same there is no such thing as launch and then life services at least if if that if you're building a like you know a PVP or you're bu trying to build a game that is longevity um and so that's my other side is like stop de prioritizing live service to get to

launch those are great answers I don't have a lot to follow up in um especially on the AAA expectations side I think if you're a smaller Studio coming into the space and you're willing to take on a premium uh business model approach I think there's interesting niches within the the PVP shooter space that you can look into especially if you have a strong game thesis and you're bringing some interesting init Innovation there um but outside of that and maybe as a cheeky transition point maybe consider making a PVE game and instead of a PVP game in the shooter space uh that might also be something to consider okay but we we will have to do the PVE shooter space in another deep di call um thanks a lot for taking the time everyone this has been an amazing Deep dive podcast into PVP Shooters um it feels like we've got a lot of content here we feel you you got to get your three questions hold on you no no you're a part of this too so my my top three would start from differentiation right around like does

the game have a meaningful difference that rises beyond the level that we've seen from Spectre finals Etc right and differentiation cannot just be a a say marketing asset change has to be felt within the core gameplay and actually meaningfully change the Mastery curve like that's the only way we're going to be able to get to the installs part then in terms of like the retention and liveops part um I poking at it there where like I think we have to start to rethink our live model in terms of Four Four Seasons events we need to be rethinking that and say like what's what are new approaches and what's ways that we can have higher productivity of our content like that that's a good framing around it because if we can attack those two then besides all those like those are the extrinsic those are the external factors then there still is this like core gameplay which the bar on core is incredibly High you play finals like these are great Shooters they great great feeling Shooters Delta Force was playing that over the weekend great

feeling shooter um but unfortunately like the bar to get the head turning moment is you need like call Call of Duty level game field um in order to get people to to change you can't just go with table Stakes shooter anymore that would be my my three there you go Phil hopefully you're happy with that I am okay thanks Phil U well let's call it at that um thanks a lot for the time guys great discussion and we should definitely have another one yeah thanks everyone thank you guys you did it you made it to the end of the episode as a fan of the show it would help us out if you subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast service of your choice more importantly are you a member of the deconstructor of fund slack group if you have 5 years or more of games industry experience go to deconstructor of fun.com slack and apply to join join the games industry's best professional community filled with peers always willing to lend a hand or subscribe to our newsletter to get all

the latest insights from the deconstructor of fund content creators thanks for listening [Music]