Strategy Case Studies: Mobile Clones, IP Ecosystem, UGC - The Metacast by Naavik

[Music] we should be really happy that we were born in the previous generation this next generation of kids are amazing and they're they're going to destroy all our lunches and i'm super excited for them to make me unemployed or retired depending on how [Music] hey friends welcome to the metacasteron table by navik today we're joined by aaron bush co-founder of navic and deep lover of ice cubes um and nailed as gupta co-founder and cpo of first light games and said park venture partner at big craft ventures so i have a long time no see good to have you back yeah it's sometimes hard being a venture partner and an entrepreneur at the same time you basically find yourself waking up and realizing you haven't called your mother in three months oh no

did you call your mother i did yesterday i felt very bad about it i was like oh how's your summer been is it somewhere still because in england it's already fall with rain and fallen leaves you know i have to say i understand i mean i mean rest in peace the queen and everyone else but i understand that it has to be the reason why they had such imperial tendencies was just how awful that island is wow deep deep definitive thoughts here um i don't i don't i don't know how i can save this maybe we'll move on um aaron do i i think you have a response from any on your ice love yeah i wasn't expecting when you asked you asked money what his most memorable part of gamescom was and then he called out the one time that i admired an ice cube it threw me off i wasn't expecting it

but but to add slightly more context behind what was what was said so i went to hawaii a while back i went to a cocktail bar um called uh bar leather apron which i highly recommend and when i was there i got a drink that had this perfect and i mean like absolutely perfect giant sphere ice cube and and at the time i hadn't thought like anything about ice in my life because you know why would i but then i complimented the ice cube and the the the bartender mixologist guy he he told me all about it he said that they they use a certain type of water they boil it for a certain amount of time at a certain temperature which helps like build like a clear and like well-rounded consistency then they like made purpose-built tools to shape it like exactly to their specs and then they freeze it a certain way for a certain amount of time to be used like for a specific shift in a specific evening and

then i got a couple more more drinks and they were like these like ice of like different shapes and stuff that were like also perfect it just blew me away it blew me away like how there could be so much diligence and art and something um so mundane as ice cubes so now when i go to cocktail bars um which i like rarely ever do but i guess i went with monu and i totally judge them like way more by the quality of their ice than i do by their drinks and it's the most ridiculous thing ever because i don't even know if i've ever made an ice cube in my life but i'm i'm just so snooty about ice cubes whenever i i get drinks now because of that that one place i went to that spoiled me so so there's the backstory that is so passionate i'm waiting for your second venture to be like ice cube monthly the podcast or something like that yeah you talk about what's hot or what's cold in the ice cube that's really good that's really good you know ice cubes are a bit of a

leading indicator of the of the quality of the bar though i like i don't disagree with that it's a little bit like how you know people judge japanese sushi restaurants on the quality of their tamago their their eggs you flight right it's like it's a leading indicator as to how much you care well the metacasa has been many things we've been a podcast about geology about um dog puzzles and now also about ice so we're branching out everyone yeah wonder what's next what's next is uh anil is going to tell us about blasto royale's was it a game update are you on a marketplace i will give you some some interesting news actually because you know web 3 is kind of like the wild west no one really knows how to navigate their way through that and there's super interesting stuff happening there so i'll give you a little anecdote about what happened to us in the last week and i think this will open your eyes a lot about the sort of problems and um exciting things that are happening in this space so i think our game on like a lot of sort of nft or web 3 projects is like very game of focus because our team

is like you know intrinsically built games from the ground up all night so in our community rather than having like speculators per se we have a lot of players like they love the game they play the game every day we do streams and we do challenge them that they like it so what's interesting is that these guys they are not crypto savvy not crypto savvy at all so we have to win them over a different way to explain them like why are you even caring about nfts why do you want them in the game so now we have a version of the game you can only play the game if you have nfts that work on our marketplace although this is like on testnet so it's not on the mainland so try explaining all of those concepts to someone who loves games but does not know what nfts or crypto is right and that was a challenge that we face now because we've built up so much good trust with them and we have a good game they're like okay look we'll do whatever it takes just to play the game because we want to play the game so they kind of like navigated through the funnel and then they would enjoy it but here's sort of like the boomer moment of what happened so when we were making our marketplace because we wanted to get it like rolled out pretty quickly so people could play the game

we didn't optimize it for mobile so it's not supported mobile officially right now so people would start playing the game and then be like well how can i connect to the marketplace i'm like oh it's easy dude just use your pc and you can log into it they're like who has a pc and like what do you mean who has a pc and like these guys are like between 16 and 24 and they're like if they if i need to play this my pc i'm out i'm not playing this game anymore and so this was this moment where i felt like forget boomer it's millennial with the new boomer because we just assumed that all these guys who chats us on discord all day long must have a pc to do that but they're not they're doing it on their phone in class in lesson in uni whatever so anyway we managed to work hard then we got them into the game and they managed to navigate their way through we sort of found a way to do it and they got it um and then what was interesting is to begin with there was like a lot of anti you know why does this even matter and i think like this is the like the big thing that people need to solve so there's a lot of hate around nfts at the moment understandably because you know it's a volatile market it's not the kind of best thing but how do you explain to gamers like what is the benefit like why

would i care and it's interesting to just kind of off air a few of us were talking about magic the gathering and that's kind of the analogy that i always use so i too used to play magic at the gathering as a kid and for me it's kind of easy to understand what an nft is because if i buy the cards then it's my card so i could sell it to somebody else i could trade it when my wife tells me it's time to stop playing video games we need to raise a family i can just sell my collection and i can you know fund the university studies of it etc etc so they do actually get that and what's really cool is they've actually kind of gamified the marketplace and we see that like in our discord people like hey i'm selling my shotgun who wants to get in great deal and it's like a terrible shotgun they just want to make enough blast so that they can buy like the good item in their game and they get it and what's also cool is that the idea what we're trying to sell it's a gamers is like making builds so it's a bit like magic the gathering when you make decks like what's the best deck so we started off with like um the dps build so people are very quickly i just want to have the items i do the most damage as fast as possible to one shot kill you but then that was quickly countered by the speed

build some people worked out that if you make your character really really fast you can just run around the guy that does the dps and even though you need to hit them five times you can do that that many times well now we're on like generation three of the meta so now we've got like the tank built and the tank build is that you can withstand so much damage that the fast guys even though it's really hard to get a hit they can't get you so yeah i'm rambling a bit but you have all this really interesting thing going on and i find it fascinating because i think like this is the thing that sometimes you get a lot of people discussing things and hot takes and i think this and i think that but when you're actually in it in the trenches on the front row seeing some of those things is very interesting and you know it's probably about the 12th time already where something has happened either good or bad that we didn't expect and it's changed our perception of what we need to do going forward and that's the thing that i really like and what i think the biggest thing that we're learning is that what web3 is really giving people is like ownership over their game and i don't even necessarily just mean through like the sort of digital asset side but i mean that the ownership of

like i get to choose like how the game goes forward like these guys are listening to me and i'm interested in working or giving my time to this game because that's something that's missing like you know um imagine like in the matrix when it's like red pill blue pill what if maria everything i told you about games development was wrong what if there's another way to develop games and like this is the way so i can tell some more another time but i just found it super interesting and i also felt more old this week than i think i ever have in the last 10 years um some people even think tablets are pcs that's what some people in our community think they think you're a boomer if you have a tablet well i don't have neither tablet nor a pc so i'm young so you're you're hip you're one of the coolest i am hip yeah that's that's interesting because you don't need webfree to listen to a community i was agreeing with you all the way until that that part because how does true ownership and listening come from blockchain well that's where you can help because i think that's another topic for another

day but that's where i feel like nfts well i feel like nfts and tokenization can help with that right and you're rewarded for getting in early it's a bit like kick-starting but when you kick-start a project you don't really get any benefit other than the thing that you signed up for that's here but again like magic the gathering so i once bought a card called timewalk said will probably know what that card does it's pretty overpowered you really can't pay you can really play you really can pay for your children's uh university i was gonna say that that card is now worth quite a lot of money so i remember i spent i think 300 pounds on it like when i was maybe 15 years old and now it's probably worth about i don't know 20. is this worth a lot of like 20k it's worth a lot yeah yeah wow you had 300 pounds for a card when you were 15. well actually i want a tournament to get to get the money to do it so they anyway we'll move on um yeah i think we're running a bit out of time but is there anything from the nintendo direct or playstation state of play that got you excited

i'm just stoked for god zelda oh yeah new legend of zelda god of war ragnarok i just can't can't wait it looks so good are you going to disappear in november it's coming out november isn't it uh yeah i think so um i might i might disappear it'll be hard to keep me from from jumping straight in well i was still glued to the fact that tunic is going to be on playstation in a couple weeks don't care about all of these triple a games i just want golden eye golden eye on on the switch oh yeah are you serious are you excited for it yeah welcome tonight sorry sorry just checking all right so today we're going to be talking about uh scopely acquired stumble guys we'll dive into that a bit um ubisoft strategy because since the news last week that we briefly discussed about tencent

acquiring an additional stake in ubisoft there's been a bunch of news announced from their ubisoft forward and we're also going to dive into the learnings from the roblox developer conference that seb attended so i'll do a very quick summary to kick off the scoply acquiring uh stumble guys um so summer guys was developed by kiska games a nine person studio from finland and this is extremely impressive because nine people developed a mobile game that has a 20 million dau whoa the purchase price wasn't disclosed and the ceo of kitkat games mentioned that they're a small game studio and they're looking for a partner to take stumble guys into the next into the next level because at their heart they're passionate about the development process so i assume now that stumble guys has reached the stage of success with the core loop and the overall monetization it goes into a live ops growth mode and that's not their expertise and nice scoply's expertise

i don't think there's a plan confirmed about whether they're hiring the employees of kikka games because they only acquired the game they didn't acquire the studio it's only the game so just a few timelines so stumble guys as you can tell by the name was originally a clone of fall guys and fall guys was released on steam in playstation in august 2020 stumble guys released on google play september 2020 so a month after fall guys was released on um the platforms i mentioned and then they went to the app store in february thereafter and up in october of 2021 onto steam as a premium game whilst on mobile it was free to play so there's some interesting interactions i just want to highlight between steam and mobile i found this a bit surprising i guess i didn't expect that the the steam audience could have influenced so much the downloads of the mobile game so stumble guys had a 50 discount on steam in the lunar lunar new year this year um and we see an uplift in the in

the downloads during that month and then most importantly it went free to play on steam in april 2022 and then you just see us skyrocket so they went the daily downloads went one fit 40k to around 220k yeah blown away by that and then fall guys went free to play and launched on switch xbox they left steam to go onto the epic game store because media tonight is owned by epic games and they have cross platform and then we see an additional skyrocket of daily downloads of stumble guys on mobile um went to around 310k so all in all that was from 40k at the beginning of the year to 310k of daily downloads yes you know one reason why that's the case it's because if you type full guys mobile into google stumblegrass comes up yeah exactly it's uh i was gonna dive into that i think it's extremely

intelligent i i was looking into is it's the advantage of being a clone of a non-mobile game developing your clone as a mobile first experience and getting to the mobile market first with that level of quality um and it worked for them so do yeah what do you think well i'll go if it's okay because i guess i've already champed into it yeah i find it super interesting on so many levels i think a little bit of background here as well um media tonic used to work with scopely and they made a game called yahtzee for them and at one point there was like serious talk about uh mediatonic being bought by scopely and then mediatonic released this game called full guys and that kind of went out the window so i guess that perhaps scopely knew how powerful stroke may have a bit of fomo of not getting that company over the line so i find that it's not surprising at all that scopey of all people would buy this particular game given that they may have been aware of its existence you know in the studio i'm not sure how much there's a bit of speculation but but the rest is

definitely true there so that's definitely one thing i have on that scopely i think as you're right they're really good at scaling games they typically say that they only really purchase studios or games if they believe it can make 500 million us dollars a year in revenue so they must see massive you know potential in a game like this and i believe it because they've proven that time and time again that they've done it for example with the star trek game which is one that i didn't really think could do that and they've proved that they could so um i'm sure they've done their r d and like think the kpis are great and they can really work this angle coming back to the thing that i just said i think the thing that really makes me laugh is that i see this time and time again where sort of um being overly corporate sometimes leads to a lunch money getting stolen by somebody else so i think zynga is the biggest example of this where they had farmville a long time ago and they never made a mobile version now i remember i myself worked in this game called smurfs village and that was just farmville but with the smurfs ip and we got to number one top grossing on the app store this was when there wasn't even a google play store we did really

well and then of course years later even though they then did release a mobile farm bill they didn't do a very good job on it and then supercell came along with payday and that just proved it again so they're like they failed twice in in that regard and i just think that like in this case mediatonic and epic they've done this acquisition for quite a long time now like i feel they might have been overly indexing on trying to make a very high quality mobile version of the game and in the meantime someone's come along and already got that i i find it quite scandalous that yeah if you type in mobile guys sorry a full guy's mobile another competitor that comes up in terms of search engine optimization that just feels like i guess they make so much money that they don't really care but um i think it's very clever of kitka games especially if the nine people show that they've got a really good growth mindset entrepreneurial ability but i just find it surprising that sometimes yeah like i say is it that they're too slow to move on it is that they don't really care i i'm not really sure there but um yeah i think the game is really good i think full guys it being mobile

free to play just makes so much obvious sense it's a super fun game you can share a bit um uh credits are things as you know in a startup field myself i always have a lot of respect for people that can get such massive traction with so few resources i think it's an amazing story and really quite motivating a year and a half ago i had a conversation um with with javier the co-ceo of scopely and um one thing i found interesting about what he was saying is that you know you know you know compared to other studios like rather than being m a first their co-development first to really like any type of structure first that you know they prefer to like work with games teams like as they really are just like talent and ltv first and are like willing to be flexible on the structure in which they they operate um and and how they publish games as long as it serves you know a large market there's a great like team uh generally behind it and it has impressive long-term ltv differential um

but you know a game like stumble guys coming to scopefully in my opinion you know it makes all the sense of the world because you know that that tiny team um you know like is now going to be uh you know or the game made by the tiny team is going to just immediately be plugged into a larger ecosystem and technology platform and if scopely can really help the team expand its live ops capabilities in particular like that is good is what's going to have like the largest effect on ltv and competitive differentiation at least in the near term probably which will you know then enable scopely to get more aggressive with with ua and you know we'll see if it works but it's it's just the kind of thing that works particularly well in a company like scopely like it it wouldn't work in most places um uh but you know there are a handful of publishers where it could make sense i think scopely is probably about as good of a fit as you could get for this kind of game

the stumble guys revenue per download is around 0.20 that that is amazing for a game that's meant to be hyper-casual yeah yeah i think overall is an incredibly intelligent team the more i was researching into the the history i think it just shows you the the power of having a very small yet very talented team with that are have high business acumen understanding opportunities of the market being very good at designing monetize a monetization layer that is deep enough for all levels from free to play to low spenders to to high spenders a fun core loop that you can play with them with your friends it's easy to pick up and go i think they understood what changes they needed to make compared to fall guys to make it mobile first so for example the lobbies are smaller so that the rounds are faster they have a lot shorter sequences of

announcing who's going into the next round and giving rewards so i think it takes about three minutes for a full play if you reach the end or if you lose you can continue witnessing to then go into the next one it has for me it has so many parallels with what made among us work and among us exploded i believe was also around october 2020 so they had a chance to analyze this and see oh okay we can make remote group play um by having all of these all these features and other validation yeah well they just went fast as well that's my point is that where is full guys mobile i mean that game came out in 2020 it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out there should be a mobile version um and now they're going to end up copying the game that actually copied them which makes me laugh when you get this a weird thing and they'll probably always be one step behind because the other game is doing it and you know full guys is it really an ip not really i mean to the end user they didn't really care so much for it so unless they really unnecessary to call it fortnight for

guys or something like that which that might well i mean that could be a relevant thing to do given the acquisition if that's gonna cheapen the cpi and really push it up um but i agree with everything that's been said about yeah the yeah admiration the most important thing is just that timing it's just so fast august 2020 on steam stumble guys comes on google play on september 2020 that's a three-week development cycle at best and so we're talking about that type iteration while fall guys it's not their mistake by the way i actually think it's actually a proper thing for them to have done is that they were capitalizing on their massive success on pc your first instinct shouldn't be to okay let's go switch to other platforms it should be like monetizing and maximizing them and you know insofar as they eventually did sell to epic their outcome is pretty amazing irrespective of the of their mobile launcher but not it is interesting right now i i will say that scopely and you know in the same vein tilting

point and some of these other folks continue to deploy is particularly interesting it doesn't sound as though everyone has great belief anymore as to their ability to drive traffic into games and often especially hyper casual games really they're betting on their own ability to drive traffic we'll see if the changes to like you know add network 4.0 allow people to monetize or drive better traffic in the next iteration of of the apple app store but it is an interesting acquisition for that reason in part because do we think that's going to grow do we think it's going to grow precipitously from 20 million eiu which is usually a you know a holding point to you know 40 or 100. irrespective of that like we don't know the terms fully so it's always hard to tell i can't emphasize enough especially for people on both sides how much price matters right if price really matters for scopely and price really should matter for stumble guys guys so and gals i suppose i actually don't know

yeah i think i mean i think growth is definitely part of it it's a big question but i think just as much as probably about longevity because you know this type of game in like a hyper competitive environment um you know it had the potential and the team the team was smart but it had the potential to be more of like a flash of the pan kind of experience where you know it explodes you know because of their their great timing and whatever they differentiated compared to the competition but you know as the market shifts and as you know maybe fall guys goes to mobile et cetera um it would have a harder time with a smaller team like really putting in the work to like continue to drive that differentiated experience that you know keeps retention and you know just keeps the game above the pack and so i think you know what scoflake can bring to the table it's not just as much like the the audience driving although you know maybe that's some of it and they probably have you know just smart capabilities in that in that team that a small team wouldn't have to kind of think about expanding ua et cetera and you know timing their

moments but if they can you know extend the longevity of this game then it would have been otherwise through like more resources deployed and like the right ways for development and such i think that is actually maybe where like just as much value like longer term value creation could happen but i don't know i guess we'll we'll see how it shakes out i mean i i like often times when you see conversations like this it's more of a function of diminishing marginal returns on capital to yourself right so uh if you're lucky to have or depending on where you stand if you are lucky or unlucky to have gone through this there are such massive deltas between i remember the first like thousand dollars i saved versus the first like you know five figures amount i say and there's like massive deltas between you know making 20 grand a year i think next jump at least in the u.s around 80 grand a year and then the next uh probably point your life changes a little bit more is around 280 300 depending on what city in the united states you live

oftentimes when i see small teams getting acquired by scopely it reminds me a lot of baseball now grant i have no idea what the demographic information of this podcast is so this might be a horrendous reference but in baseball you often see that players are under contract control from the team and that that contract pays a very small amount of money relatively speaking if they wait their full you know seven years then they can become a free agent and make hundreds of millions of dollars or they'll never get there and they'll make zero and so there's a strong incentive especially for players in the you know two three years in to basically be like hey i will give up massive percentages of my future earning from the expected value perspective in order to capture the gain today and i honestly think especially with this current economic environment that's not a bad outcome for most studios right now it's like hey like we'll put money in your pocket we'll be able to therefore allow you to continue to do your job grow the game do something you enjoy doing but also your kids get to go

to university you can buy you can buy like a three bedroom house and move out of your one-bedroom apartment right like these are some really interesting dynamics i think we see a lot of a lot of in in gaming whereas i think the last few years especially in this bull run and especially inside of uh consumer mobile and uh you know casual and mid-core mobile gaming there was a real reticence to sell you had to really come knocking on the door with a lot of money whereas today they're like hey like you know there's a chance like half of europe might not exist next week like we don't know do you want to like divest yourself and like diversify your assets and so i certainly think it's you know for people like scopely and tilting point these guys who have the capital deploy it's a really great spot for them right now uh a brief comparison as we were talking about overall revenue subway surfers from cyborg that's now miniclip uh the game's on google play's top 10 apps by downloads that's not just looking at

games it's looking at all the apps on google play the absolute revenue they've had is 115 15 million and it's been live since 2013 and stumble guys to the day so since late 2020 to today is around 45 million so they're nearly half the way and i think surface is quite a driven though because it has a very young demographic right like that's a good point yeah because i i know that subway surface like up thou is like less than one cent it's like yeah yeah yeah yeah it's the most downloaded in game of all time because every kid under the age of seven it's like if your kid is crying subway surfers is your answer there's a free pro tip for anyone listening again i don't know the demographic but you can thank me later right right right this is um if we're really appealing to the baseball watching 45 plus demo in the united the last the last take i had on the on

the topic is is maybe the industry of new founders becoming comfortable of knowing what makes them happy what part of the business makes them happy because working in a company that's developing a new game and you're going through that process and trying to release a success and then grow it to become sustainable that challenge is very different to okay you have a successful game and now you're making these smaller gains by by optimizing um how it performs that's that's a very different mindset and a different day-to-day and it sounds that the decision as well that kidko games did is based is based on what what they enjoy the most which is the development process yeah i mean they probably don't even care that much for the game they made this as surprising as that might sound because they essentially copied something and got it to market quickly they realized there was an angle in the market that they could attack so if you look at the deal they get a lot of capital up front they get to keep their entire team that work together on making

games and now they can work on that game they can probably work on whatever game they ever what they wanted to do and have fun doing it and the game in the audience will enjoy the product because a really good team is going to buy it and look after it so it seems like it's a great deal around and why this is one of those rare examples where they probably weren't interested in selling the studio because they didn't want to go down the soft corporate wagon but rather as you say enjoy the development process and you can do that once they're going to be excited for what they can make next can you re can you relate to that as a co-founder yourself do you yeah absolutely because i think it's like sometimes you know if i could make my dream game what would it be and the answer is very simple it'd be the fourth iteration of street fighter 3 the best fighting game of all time if i was to make that game there'd probably be about five people that would play it one of which is me so do you want to spend hundreds of millions developing said game or do you want to make something that's going to be commercially viable you know you have to analyze the market look at what generations are buying games etc etc so it depends because i got it started in the industry as being

like i love games i love working on games working on games is one of the most fun things you can do it's like being in a rock band where you have to put people with very different talents together and hope it comes off so like me and our art director think about things in completely a different way right left side of the brain versus right side of the brain but when we come together we can make something special there's something really fun about that and you know having this nucleus of an idea become reality is one of the most satisfying things out there but working on a failed game it turns out isn't the most fun thing in the world either so it's kind of like sure you know on one angle if you could just thought let's say for me if i was lucky enough that like we managed to exit the company i think i would still make video games because i actually think it's more fun to make video games than it is to play them as crazy as the other as that sounds um maybe i'm just a sadio masochist i don't know that i have that kind of opinion but i can understand it that like you know deving with your friends is like really really good fun especially a small team it's like wicked wicked fun because you know it's very creative and you know seeing it all come

together is amazing things i can totally uh understand that kind of perspective and sometimes when you go more into the business side of the industry and you start looking at roi and returns and things like this it does take you away from the thing you fell in love with and my own personal story is that when we started up there was only three of us that i myself was developing again it was a bit like playing new game plus in a real life video game oh you've completed it once now you have to go back to the beginning but now it's harder so you've got to program again and then as we scale up the company i have to give away that right and i look at the team doing it and i won't lie sometimes when i see our designers and gameplay programmers coming up with a cool mechanic i get jealous i feel like oh man that used to be me that used to make that cool stuff now i'm just that bozo that goes on podcasts and things like that but hey i love being on this podcast by the way but we love having you here you know that's what it is so i i can totally appreciate the way it is and um yeah yeah i i think it's a really good decision for them if that's their motivation which i suspect it is i think that's quite a vulnerable thing

to share honestly thanks for sharing it because i think a lot of our listeners will actually relate to what you're saying i hope the people that do listen here do have that real love for games i have to say one thing that i really like being part of this podcast in particular is that most of the people on it i think really are just sort of gamer geeks you know at their core and and that's what really kind of got them into the industry even if they're involved in an ancillary way and i think it's like important never to sort of lose that thing i often people often i don't know about you guys but for example how many games do you play in your personal life what often happens is when you get involved in games you actually play a lot less of them because you've got work to do and that's kind of like a sad thing yeah it is the saddest thing in the world i i wish i could say i have i i just got playstation 5 it's the first console i've owned in 10 years so wow we know aaron's going to be playing ragnarok i thought you were going to jump in there aaron are you going to say something nope no okay well i think we'll move on

then to ubisoft uh is this you know it is me yes so ubersoft had an event recently called ubisoft forward i guess it's like their own it's quite common in industry now for people to have their own events rather than going to e3 because they get a lot more exposure by the way poor e3 yeah yeah i i do get that i have to say um i can understand why though because when there's sort of like 57 games being announced you just get no share and right it can affect sales so i understand why companies do this um but i have to say their one um is very interesting i think ubisoft's a company that comes up quite often i think on the podcast because they do a lot of unusual things like you know they've tried doing like blockchain in some of their games and things like this so i think like the headlines that i want to go through one um there's a new assassin's creed game back after a two-year break which you know is a super big ip always interesting to talk about that i think the things that i found more interesting that the big one for me was the fact that they're collaborating with netflix in two ways so one netflix is helping them to make mobile games which sounds

kind of weird to me like why does a studio that big need netflix so that's really what i think will be interesting to discuss but they are also going to be making an assassin's creed live-action series which i guess is going to tie in with one of the games that they're making so that's super cool because this kind of like a evergreen ip and utilization has come up i think at least three times of the podcast i've been before so this is like the biggest example of that i've seen yet uh tencent has increased at stake um is that given the extra financial firepower to do some of these things what does it mean for the company they've always been remarkably sort of anti-takeover you know vivendi tried to buy them many years ago and you know they're like get lost we want to be our own selves so how does that play into it they have a new tom clancy gaming beta also kind of interesting um and some of the gameplay was interesting it seemed like they were kind of going more towards sort of like a jumbo the new assassin's creed one of them is set in japan which i think is really cool are they going for sort of like the rise uh or the resurgence of samurai-based games sakiro go to

tsushima i can name some more that got popular so lots of things to kind of go through i'll hand it over to the panel as to which one they want to pick up what most got your attention and let's discuss it yeah the netflix thing in particular is something that i've been thinking a lot about recently but also important for ubisoft which is as we see the saturation slash law slash just change in approach in terms of user acquisition it's clear to i think a lot of observers that effectively if you have an audience it doesn't matter if you're netflix or tick tock or snapchat that's a great audience to tap into from a game perspective because like realistically as a game developer all you're looking for is is an audience monetization comes secondary frankly because like once you have the audience if you understand how to monetize you understand and monetize and so i really did appreciate the approach that they're taking in terms of leveraging netflix not only for this but also for game

making it's very similar to not to spoil the first episode or second episode of the game of thrones show the new game of thrones show actually ends if you stick through the like after credits to be effectively a large advertisement for their new mobile game their new game of thrones mobile game and it's really using these outsized like leverage points in order to therefore push the ip to generate more content and to generate more eyeballs for the game itself that to me was one of the most interesting things especially inside of this announcement and part b is also and you know i think you hit the nail on the head a lot of people came out being like what the heck is happening as opposed to understanding immediately hey like this is actually an insane value point that people are uh are starting to realize yeah i i've been really bullish on the idea of sorry i i was just gonna say i've been really bullish on the idea of like emerging like ip ecosystems with the sense that like you see it in a

couple ways you see like one um like there's the call of duty model where like an amazing brand that already is super popular and big is able to like spin up new game modes go free to play on console pc go you know free to play on mobile um and be able to you know take like another like step function jump in their audience reach and revenue potential and there are a lot of brands that could also take similar types of approaches in their own ways and i've always thought that assassin's creed um would be a good candidate for being one of those just because of how like unique and flexible and big like that ip and audience is and so you know being just one rpg game every other year like really they could do a lot more than that and so it's cool to see them trying to do that through both doing that but also kind of spinning up maybe more like the the og narrative kinds of games going to mobile but then also yeah

like doing doing this netflix thing both having an assassin's creed tv show um and uh having you know like games in tandem with netflix too because you know what we've seen you know probably like the last big example of this so i'm sure we've talked about previously was like when the witcher came out on on netflix that was a huge advertisement and you know for you know the books and the the the games and it made a pretty huge difference and um yeah the netflix homepage really is like one of the best marketing channels in the world um by far and assassin's creed again like a really incredible ip like it actually has the possibility it i don't know like how i don't know who's making the show or anything like that but it it's the kind of ip that has the possibility to actually be pretty cool and if they can make it cool not only does that drive the value and expansion of the assassin's creed audience and brand but if they can do

like even like a game within netflix which you know like low downside for ubisoft for trying something like that it's a good like initial step for people to kind of take the jump from oh i just saw this cool tv show now there's a game on it so oh wait now there's like this entire gaming ecosystem behind it too so i'm i'm really excited about like the ideas that assassin's creed is pushing forward and all the different things they're trying to do as always it boils down to execution like is the show going to be good are the mobile games really going to work can you know this like they're kind of building like the it used to be called like codename infinity i don't know if they gave a new name for it that sort of is like a hub yeah for all the new assassin's creed expansions and stuff that come together like how is that really going to come together so i think there still are a lot of questions but um in theory like it could be a really cool step function increase for this ip2 and i think that's really exciting yeah i wanted to dig into the infinity a

little bit because i was going into a deep dive of all of the their strategic pillars uh it seems like they they took a good look at what they were doing and set the the scene for the upcoming years um now i might be this is a big speculation but tencent acquired a larger stake in the relationship with ubisoft one of the games that are being released on netflix i think it's netflix or is it because they're developing a mobile game that's not with netflix it's a separate assassin's creed mobile rpg so i can see you watch the the tv series you play the free game that comes with your netflix subscription that's about assassin's creed has no monetization download the other game that has a load of monetization gets you into their ecosystem and then as always tapping into they have a history of content that people can buy so what's a better liveops than consolidating everything in a single hub of infinity they didn't share too many

details but it's meant to show you the overarching narrative and get you involved in the lore so a lot of what destiny does is get players stuck into the the lore and the fantasy give them the ability to quickly buy the contents and jump into and play and play all of the games without having to buy them separately and another thing i found very interesting is that they're also breaking down the concept that specific studios work on one of the franchise games so for example quebec and then there's another one where they usually divide it up but with the pandemic and remote working they're trying to enable wherever you are in the world whatever studio you're part of you can intermingle and develop games amongst yourselves so i think that will also be interesting to see the consequences that the pandemic had and whether that will unlock new creative potential within within ubisoft i was just going to ask anil uh about

the the project infiniti do you do you know like how that is going to work did they say anything i'm just curious like how like how would that even like work on console for example where assassin's creed is you know probably the biggest they like to keep their cards close to their chest but that way so we we don't know there's a lot of speculation um let's see what a separate so i've got some thoughts on this one so on this i think the only thing i came to mind when i was trying to picture is for example if you play borderlands you can buy borderlands through that or if you play the final fantasy 10 remaster it gives you the upsell and the loading screens by other stuff so that could be an mvp but i don't know sorry seventh way yeah no it's it's interesting because a lot of what ubisoft is good at and i think this is also shared by take two is that they tend to look a bit further into the future than some of their colleagues inside of north america in terms of the publishing side and one thing that we're seeing very clearly in the find the announcement is it's it's almost as though the precious

resource of free attention is being dried up right it's reminiscent of like the guano trade of like the 19th or 19th century right it's like a bunch of things that are super important there's really no reason to pressurize to generate nitrogen out of the air that's too expensive but once guano becomes super expensive once nitrogen's hard to find suddenly everything else makes more sense and so in a similar vein part of the reason at least from my purview as to why ubisoft cares about this type of expansion is before to your point maria they like to control everything they have they could control everything there was no additional cost to relative to the cost of acquisition of users now in this more modern 2022 but i think even looking forward to 23 24 25 what they're starting to see is like actually tension is going to become harder and harder to acquire we need to actually trade some of our own you know empire in order to make sure that we can still mine the attention we need to and so that that seems to be the driving thesis for what these guys are doing and very similar to

your point around borderlands it's very similar i think also to the straw selling and the take two guys as to how they think about their product lines and their evolution they're probably actually amusing like the take two guys are probably a few years ahead of ubisoft in terms of figuring out sort of the next frontier of thinking around this yeah they also announced that after the mirage which is the new assassin's creed they're entering a gen 3 of assassin's creed where they're taking their their learnings from gen 1 and 2 and building the next generation of what an assassin's creed game is curious to see what that's going to be about i think they're bringing multiplayer back for at least one of their games that we haven't seen since is it black black skull yeah yeah the the pirates one which is one of the best ones in the french has actually totally agree with seb by the way i think ubisoft traditionally has been a very strategic company it hasn't always come off but assassin's creed itself was a very strategic hit where they

deliberately got the game onto the ps3 really early it came out in the first month it was one of the launch titles i believe and it was pretty poor as a game but the engine was very impressive but because there was no other games really to play it sold quite well and then assassin's creed 2 came out and that was the game with the engine and that really did well and then the iap kind of took off from there so their gamble was that you can establish a new ip on the console if you get it out early and they were rewarded with it other people tried to clone that kind of approach with ps4 and weren't so successful but they certainly were but also in ubisoft's portfolio i mean they've tried to do nfts on blockchain right with their court initiative it failed but they were thinking ahead they tried to make their own launcher with ubisoft connect which also failed but they were thinking ahead and i agree that that's their kind of line in thinking is that they're not just thinking about like copying what's sort of popular but more they're sort of trying to think how can we get an unfair advantage that means five years ten years down the line we have something that people can't catch up with and i think assassin's creed is probably the best thing i've seen them do in my lifetime in the sense that you've met to

make an ip that is now going on for over a decade and has sold that many copies and is that well known uh has made a live action movie now a live action series is coming that is the benefits of what strategic planning and you know really going for it can pull off so they definitely think like that and i think a lot of other companies don't what i would say though is i think they have had very mixed results so as successful as assassin's creed was they tried something similar to that with watch dogs and that was kind of like a blunder so if they were taking their learnings from assassin's creed onto watch dogs that didn't work so there's no kind of saying that what they're learning will work for the next one but i don't want to be too unfair on them i think that i actually admire the fact that unlike other companies they seem to that seems to be something as part of their dna i wonder if like in this of private company values in their head office it's like you know they've got some sort of weird is like you know that long-term planning is going to win it you know some japanese proverb or something like that from the art of war sun tzu or something like that and and they stick to it

because they have that mantra oh that reminds me i lost my train of thought with the tencent increasing their stake in ubisoft i believe one of their mobile games is based is going to be set in china so part of their strategy could be um further penetration to the chinese market so yeah that that all makes a lot of sense the only thing i have to mention is that come on ubisoft we need more assassin's creed with some female non-binary characters it's always a strong male leading the journey through history they've never done a female assassin yet have they it's the character they haven't played in the game the past two you can like pick like what you play as male or female but then what they use on their marketing materials and all that you don't usually see the two unless yeah i i yeah sorry i was just going to add a couple of last thoughts i i know like ubisoft is um you know they are trying to be more mobile first i guess as they're saying

it which you know you know with the trends of the market like sure that makes sense and i think they've done a very successful job of that so far although we know that they have a lot of um games and development and you know we kind of mentioned you know ip ecosystems around assassin's creed really like the division and all the tom clancy stuff is sort of like their other realm of like really pushing for that kind of ecosystem they have a bunch of mobile games and development there that i'm not sure how they will do um but you know this this like newer agreement with 10 cent is probably like the biggest reason to start being more optimistic about what they could do um on on mobile because i expect we'll see a lot more um co-development and a lot more like like you mentioned like the mobile assassin's creed game is gonna you know be china-based yeah timmy's gonna make it i would they didn't announce it but i would bet that immediately that that's that's what this announcement really is i should have mentioned actually so thank you for bringing that up yeah so i'm i'm really curious to see how how

this changes their trajectory on mobile and how they they operate in that way it could be it could be a pretty big deal um the last thing i wanted to say was you know last week you mentioned um like briefly in the intro um that you know this deal that tencent increasing their shares taking place through the family holding company but you weren't sure why um and it is a complex transaction so i don't i don't know the whys behind like all the all the details like why tencent is paying so much of a higher price and all of that but um i just wanted to quickly address that and i think it really boils down to one word which is control um and uh you know over the past couple of years there's been a lot of talking and interest about maybe ubisoft selling itself getting you know roped into m a or you know strategic investors or activists private equity coming in and helping the company you know refocus and you know slim down and whatever that could turn into and

and this move basically is ten cent buying through the family holding company um with you know there are some details about like tencent is not gonna have as much voting power um and things like that and really this just boils down to the family now you know through their company has a larger stake in the business and has more control and it's now just that much harder for any activists to come and do anything um when when it's structured this way so it really is basically saying like goodbye to all the the the rumors of m a and like whatever could have happened and it's just saying like solidifying like hey this family is still in control for whatever the next era of ubisoft is going to be um and that i think that helps explain why like when this deal took place even though tencent bought at a higher price why the stock went down because it basically is just saying yeah the the odds of them getting acquired at a higher price or anything like that are probably not going to happen you can debate whether this is good or bad but i think that's the the reason behind why it is such a

unusually shape deal thanks for sharing that i i learned something you're awesome at these m a knowledge errands amazing i don't know about that but i it interests me so i i poke around a lot no because i think there's a lot to dig into just even seeing how the deals are made i think it shows a lot into what comes next to the company and what their strategy is is very interesting yeah thanks for bringing you are 100 correct on that as well because as i say there was this vivendi tried to buy them many years ago and that was going to be a hostile takeover and they resisted it with everything they could have and you're in doing this deal that means that that can no longer happen and that was always the thing that they feared so uh yeah wow aaron dropping the truth bombs i love it yeah they won't tell you that in the pr span so you gotta come down okay seb roblox

yeah so the roblox developer conference happened this past weekend and it's a really interesting conference for a variety of reasons one it's on saturday and friday it's probably a function of developer age or some type of targeting thereof it's painful the older you are so i suppose that's also built into the idea ideation of it but it really inspired a couple of macro things right so first is they've for another straight year they've come out on stage and said hey here's the things that we want roblox to do and and i really give a lot of credit to dave bazuki for for this sentiment which is he like states is five of your predictions and i love going through them because they're always such an interesting idea as to someone who's stating what they want their vision to be and then on top of that they actually talked about some things that actually do matter not to say the five year predictions don't necessarily matter but there was a lot to be said about hey what

are you trying to be and i think this is a really important topic in the world you generated gaming as a growing segment is what are these platforms trying to be are they trying to be places where the baby have concerts at right are they places where we're just playing video games right like i think these insights are really interesting in part because it's they're often counter to each other and so just to go over a few initial ones right so one of their big pushes is for animation capture tooling as well as for providing more fidelity into their game experience the flip side of this is that most research suggests that people don't care about the fidelity of the game but they actually care about the game loop themselves and fidelity is like this thing that investors care more about and like creatives and marketers care more about but they really just care if the game is fun and so in reality oftentimes the best way to build out these platforms is to decrease fidelity in exchange for performance allow more people to enjoy

and more people to have fun so it's always really interesting to see when roblox comes out and says hey the things that we're working on are about increasing fidelity about growing community about being a better vibrant ecosystem they also announced they also announced their own immersive ad system which is a really fun blow to some companies who work in the ad system inside roblox which they haven't had before and then happy to go through a lot of his predictions but basically it i find that five year predictions are almost impossible to do and always give a lot of prayer to anyone who does this i just really wanted to shout them out for at least giving you a try that's super interesting the thing about the fidelity thing i i definitely agree with that i think that hyper casual is surely the proof of that how you can get millions i mean we just talked about stumble guys exactly right i mean yeah ooh love it but making it all relevant together in the podcast but it's totally true if you're having a great time it doesn't really matter about the fidelity uh you often get people who play like

pro level battle royale games they just turn the texture detail to zero so they can see through the bushes and shoot people they just want to min max the game it's like people enjoyed experience definitely of course fidelity can be great for like that initial appeal and wow factor of bringing you in but i would also say that you know machine zone and forex games with this sort of like here's a video of a game it's not the actual game you'll play but it's a nice looking video there's also sort of proof of that too and why we probably should as developers bear in mind that like the fun and the gameplay is the most important thing um for sure and on top of that you you touched upon this at the top of the show which was that you know most people are no longer on desktops like we're we're all probably fortunate to have a nice desktop with a nice graphics card and a nice monitor and keyboard mouse but the vast majority of gamers today by most definitions i mean you can i'm sure you have some type of pc master race definition that's incorrect but by most definitions the vast majority of

gamers are on mobile and what's interesting is that not everyone pre-ordered the iphone 14 pro last week like the vast majority of people don't right the vast majority of the world especially to get out of western europe and the united states you're talking about devices that are like three four five generations off right we're talking about the samsung galaxy s7 right or the iphone 8. and when you get there suddenly we start seeing things that i remember having to care about a decade ago and haven't had to care about in a while which is performance and actual performance testing and it's been really interesting because we've been in this weird arms race in gaming where people have assumed hey like performance doesn't matter like everything's gonna be performing let's just go fidelity to the roof and now we're seeing a return especially on platforms like roadblocks but also elsewhere too hey actually you know all that stuff you learned about data structures and algorithms that you learned like you have 20 years ago we're going to start applying that again like if hey if you're if your matrix calculation is really bad

you're going to have a non-performing game and i think that's sort of the most interesting part about use generated gaming right now and that it both is bringing in all these new audiences and all these new creators who can make games of all different types to show you that loops don't matter and then on top of that if you want to make something higher fidelity you actually need to be even more engineering focused more technically savvy and i think that's a lot to do with what we're seeing inside of you know a sign of roblox inside of some of these ecosystems it's just like hey like why are you guys doing this like why are you making fidelity matter how do you move that bar forward and make sure it works on all devices i i do also think that it's been proven in gaming that the sort of best loops tend to be the ones that win out over time rather than fidelity for example if you take like the rise of sort of the soul series which is now eldon ring on playstation that game could be made to look a lot better than it does but it's just like the gameplay and the playing itself is just so addictive that it just keeps people in for a long time call of

duty was always 60 frames per second could have made it look nicer by making it 30 frames per second turns out that smooth gameplay is a reason why people want to keep playing it again and again i worked on street fighter similar thing could easily made it 30 frames per second but it turns out that 60 frames a second is where it's at and that's just the feeling but it's also kind of performance related and uh mario kart the same there's many games um aaron you say yeah i can see you want to say something oh well i was just gonna say i actually am pretty excited for roblox to be taking more steps and like a higher fidelity direction not just because it's higher fidelity but i think it unlocks different art styles that can appeal more to like different types of people for different types of games um and i think like that actually might be underrated and its potential to like to to drive more interest in certain certain directions like i totally agree that like great game loops usually when but i still think that wow

factor can matter in a lot of ways and even like you know one of the largest struggles even at my home trying to play games with my wife is that a lot of times they're not cute enough um like the characters they're they're like they're not cute enough for her to like want to play as i know that's like probably like very specific but i think you know a lot of different people they probably just like look for different things and the types of games they want to play and the types of like you know experiences they want to be immersed in and i think like when you can broaden that out like there there is a greater appeal to more types of people um in more way in more ways and so yeah there are definitely trade-offs a lot of you know the same like what you said about game lifts all that holds true but i actually am pretty excited to see maybe like what we don't expect what could come of this yeah aaron that's a great point and part of the reason why i think it's a really great point is in part because of the word you said trade-offs right that i

think is the thing that we talk about so much in development cycles but we don't talk about enough publicly which is every decision you make should be a trade-off and if it's not a trade-off it means you haven't considered the alternatives and i think that's one of the more interesting insights you can have both as a founder but also as an operator is that if you don't recognize that the thing you're doing has some trade-offs then you aren't really thinking to the whole problem i completely agree with the idea that especially motion capture is so hard for people to do if you can introduce us to games create new dancing type games that's awesome right that's going to open a new world of people who haven't made that type of game before to make that type of game and we're going to see some really interesting things come out of that and they should understand also that that is totally fine from a crater standpoint i also would caution though especially game developers who are taking a professional attack to realize hey by introducing motion capture into your game by introducing physics engines

into your game by trying to increase the fidelity of it you do actually lose out on some users just from the function they can't play your game and that's super important one one last thing i'll say on the fidelity side exciting there's a lot more to i'm packing here is that the best mental model in my opinion to figure out if you care about fidelity is just remember the first game you played and how much you enjoyed it and more importantly how good you thought it looked at the time right and i think that's one of the fun things is that uh you know gold we talked about goldeneye earlier goldeneye is a game that looks on switch really good to me but in reality it looks exactly like what i remember looking like 25 years ago right and i think that is the beauty of gaming is that brood war in my mental model of world war looks so much better than it actually does when i think about when i played you know mario 3 i was like wow the graphic quality of this game is out of this world how can they possibly get better right like that's the type of mental memory people have about games and i

think uh anil's point around the machine zone video is actually something that we should probably all doing a lot more of and maybe this will tie into netflix which just be creating netflix shows that like showcase how cute and gorgeous and awesome things look and then have them play a 8-bit game that's incredibly performant and they're like oh yeah just imagine that these are the targaryen dragons they're eight bits now but they're the same dragons i was just gonna ask i'd love to to also hear your thoughts on like the immersive ad side of thing uh with roblox and what they're kind of doing on the cutting edge of that yeah i mean this i think is a major sector of quote unquote metaphors development right advertising is maligned by a lot of people but what people don't recognize is that if you change monetization mechanisms you actually increase the the space for content in general so for example if you don't have advertising you probably don't have these like random educational videos in the punic war

inside on youtube right like it allows for more niche development and more niche types of games that aren't reliant on in-app purchases or subscriptions and so to that extent this has been this this is a known fact of gaming you've had companies like anzu and bloxbix in particular on roblox and also in places like minecraft and even on the web3 ones like the central land trying to create more advertising throughput in order to generate different sources of revenue for these games roblox has been always had a love hate relationship and they love to hate it they love to hate that other people are doing this and they're now pushing for it themselves and so the if you if you're not familiar with the term immersive ads basically you're inside the game there's a billboard in the corner this doesn't have to be in vr this doesn't have to be on pc it could even be on mobile it's just seeing ads inside the game the best example of this i would say is sponsored content inside of tv shows so you know uh john oliver did a great piece about like subways sponsored content inside of

movies and tv the next time you go watch a movie uh for example if you watch uh the multiverse of madness new doctor strange movie you know jaguar jbl the watch company did a lot of painstaking work to make sure the shots of the watch were constantly in frame right so he like always has this watch the watch and the specific watch he has is part of the thing that's not an accident there was an account executive who like fought for that and then got that sponsorship in to pay for the offsets on the constant movie and we're starting to see that type of engagement inside of roblox they're starting with some immersive banners so that when you're inside the game you have a rotating banner just like you do say walking uh by a bus station in san francisco in new york yes mimicking what humans are already accustomed to putting it into the game that happens to you when you're walking on the street there's billboards everywhere so personally i think if it's done right it won't be very disruptive and probably

better than having ads monetization where it just pops up an ad and you have to stop what you're doing to to see that ad yeah and the technology around is really cool too because effectively the way it's being solved for right now is there companies like mvp index which are you know analytics companies that then capture it on client side as opposed to server side and that's really important for cpm and cpi analysis and so we're going to see some improvements there the big concern i think everyone should have is the opposite of your concern maria where it's like it's done too well right the concern i think we have especially on platforms like roblox but also generally is that we're going to do some like to to quote a movie from 10 years ago like inception level of implementation here right like if if the ad integration is too good people just assume that that's what it is it's uh it's like how kleenex replaced facial tissues that's a word right and so i understand one of the big concerns roblox had coming in and i certainly think a lot of people in the

games world have is that the ad integration is too good we might be able to like finally change people's behaviors which you know is a very like speculative fiction type of approach to ads which i don't think we're nearly close enough to but probably worth mentioning is there any other takes on the conference we're a little bit over with with time we can definitely oh yeah last take is that we should be really happy that we were born in the previous generation this next generation of kids are amazing and they're going to destroy and eat all our lunches and i'm super excited for them to make me unemployed or retired depending on how it goes because of what you're seeing created yeah it's just just walking around the conference and seeing people of all ages some of them young and so young they have to be with their parents but they've already like made a hundred grand off of their game like this that's awesome and by the way like the the like the variant like there there's just so many more you know people of color women non-binary folks that you don't see typically in the game space at

games conferences like e3 like 10 years ago 10 years ago everyone was pretty much white men for the most part right and so like that movement has been really cool and it's just awesome to see someone who's like 19 and already has their like figured out in terms of like i just want to make cool stuff i'm like man when i was 19 i just wanted to uh insert beer here one one last question i wanted to ask you since you're since you're here and you you work you know with infinite canvas um you know and the the ugc realm too um you know we we hear a lot about i guess a lot of teases around like the the rise of like the next ugc platforms like you know obviously manticore is out there we know epic is working on stuff etc um roblox has the advantage that it spends like over 200 million dollars a quarter on r d but i just wanted to get your take on like the next like two three years like how big of a threat to roblox are all these other platforms that will probably emerge um

sooner sooner than later or will roblox you know just continue to dominate because of network effects etc yeah in a 12 to 24 month period there's almost no chance unless it's specifically fortnite that someone's going to generate a audience large enough to compete and overtake roadblocks now the hope i think for all of us is that we want to see more platforms you don't want a youtube centric world where it's only one platform winning it now the downside is that especially for user generated you just need a lot of people the creator uh you know create a consumer ratio even at ten thousand one still requires you have a million people play and so i think one of the hardest things for these new platforms is there's a chicken and neck problem where they can't have people make cool stuff on their platforms until they have people on their platforms and so i would say you know if you had asked me this question a year ago i'd be more bullish because there was a cost of capital was lower and so there was an

argument to be like hey you can fund someone you give them 100 million dollars and run out and acquire a bunch of users you're probably not going to see that in the next funding cycle of the year or so as a result what you're end up which we end up with something is very different where people are just going to like grow their platforms organically like the old days and if that's the case i think you should almost always bet on the incumbent that said i am still very bullish on fortnite creative i think they're probably the guys who are second row to use a formula one reference ready to take on max verstappen or whoever they're taking on right now so that i think is probably the biggest platform every other platform is just so sorely lacking on users right now you if you had to predict the trend line you predict that they don't increase their users exponentially over 12 months gotcha cool thanks that's really interesting i think on on that sorry small last question again sev you're here i don't know when you're coming back um thanks for having me by the way no it's awesome to have you here so

i believe in bitcraft you also you invest in ugc as one of your expertises what do you predict is going to cause the next huge step in ugc time this is this is this is not what people want to hear but typically speaking time is the greatest determinant and i'll give you a quick example uh the in in the united states the highest spending cohort bar none is women 35 to 49. it's not even close like they're just like the highest spending cohort of spenders right and they're like hey they don't play games yet is like the question but it's not that they don't play games is that like the people who play games just aren't in that cohort yet like i certainly know 27 to 33 year old women who spend thousands of dollars against an impact right that's a reality they're just not in the 35 to 49 cohort yet and i think in a similar thing we have this entire generation of gen z that are making some really cool user generated products

leveraging these ecosystems making new cool games that we've never seen before don't even understand i certainly don't understand them like they just need time like you just need some wait wait a few years to see if they come up and and we're gonna start seeing that trickle in so if you if you were to ask specifically what the biggest variable is is just check back in a couple years check back in five years check back in 10 years right the smaller variables are you know macro based blockchain could be a variable that's really driving consumer value to users and thus incentivizing user generated content creation we haven't seen that quite yet netflix youtube snapchat tick tock these platforms are traditionally not in gaming are thinking about coming into gaming netflix already has those guys and gals as they come into gaming like you know that's what we're going to start seeing really blow up and so but that even then is is controlled more by time thank you all right anything else from anyone or

well it's been a fun conversation though yeah yeah lots of interesting topics this was by coincidence but we ended up doing case studies of of business strategies in different um segments of the industry it's very very interesting that's a good title yeah well there you go title decided uh yeah you can find us on discord if you have anything anything to add um thank you so much for joining three of you it's awesome to have you here and we'll see you again next week [Music] you