Superstar Fireside Chat: Playing the Content Game in the Great Mobile Consolidation

to kick things off we're going to launch right into the fireside tr chats um under under the title called playing playing the uh the content game in the great mobile consolidation and i have the pleasure of hosting that five-sided chat and having with us uh jam city's co-founder and president joshua josh how are you hello hello chris thank you so much for having me i'm so excited to be here today you all do such an amazing job with this pocket gamer conference i i really appreciate it we're so excited to be part of it well i i don't know i don't do the rest of the team do i'm just i just come in and try not to mess up too much how's your day going i i it's early in the morning there of course i guess it's sunny in l.a right stupid question but is it bright and early we have the sun rising in the background so i was excited to get up this morning and uh start with my cup of coffee and a chat with chris james i mean what a better

way to start the day uh for anybody in the world i'm available i do i do mornings also also children's parties and bar mitzvahs anyway let's crack on so as you're the first on the on um talk on the first person on the track i thought we'd do a little bit of setting the scene and then going to the specifics of james c obviously we want to know about jam city those exciting things going on but just to kick off i've got a couple of general questions just gauge you know how how the the the old um m a and investment space is going um according to various reports we we had over 600 billion that seems crazy right of investments uh can't be billy must be any six a massive number of investments and other deals already completed um by the end of q2 and that number is still growing rapidly uh week by week um it's last year was a record this year is going to be you know even bigger it's already even bigger so it's better to say the games industry is kind of riding some pretty unprecedented uh crests and waves at moments when we threw pretty uncharted waters um

but is is are we at peak gaming is or is this the beginning of a whole new golden age for games industry what do you think oh my god we are nowhere near peak gaming chris yeah i mean i mean you can think about it in two ways number one yes there's a lot of investment right now but people are spending so much time in games they're spending more time playing games especially mobile games in particular which is driving a lot of this growth uh than they are you know watching tv certainly watching films spending time in in radio there's no surprise to me that we're seeing a lot of consolidation in this space this this industry is still relatively fragmented there are no you know if you look at again like television or film where there are three or four or five really big leaders in each country and many times global leaders you're just not seeing that in in mobile gaming yet and so again we have to separate it a little bit because console gaming's a little bit different it's been around that space actually is quite

consolidated mobile gaming it is the wild west it is 3x the size of console gaming we are just at the beginning so that's from a business standpoint i have to say from a product standpoint too the devices are getting so much better that we can make so much better games now than we could five years ago five years ago felt primitive but i think even now we're just at the beginning i feel like games are good but they're not amazing i i i don't know yet if we're making the franchises that people are going to be talking about in 50 years i want to be doing that that's what we're all striving for right now i am really excited where the product goes and as soon as the product gets great the dollars keep following so more consolidation better product that's going to drive gaming go i need you i need to start all my tracks like this is the best this is it this is it come on i'm ready to go and launch the game's company straight away so um because so what like obviously you know your your optimistic your abolition and rightly so um are there any particular kind of interesting trends or opportunities you'll see anything new that's that's happening you're saying we're still in

the wild west a little bit you know we've had people talking about um you know there's a little bit of hyper casual acquisitions recently they've been games companies adding their own advertising tech is you know that seems to be an interesting trend that's kind of happened is there anything you're you're you'll notice in particular that's interesting you know it's it's it's going to be interesting to see i think often times at sort of like the earlier stages of these industry uh uh expansions you don't know necessarily exactly where it's going to go or who the leaders are going to be i i it reminds me of for instance the the dot-com boom in the 90s where there was a ton of money going into the space people asked also by the way if it was sort of like peak digital and then it was all going to go away and it was some trend it turns out some of the players that were funded then ended up becoming industry leaders many many of them did not you didn't know necessarily was it e-commerce what like was it uh gaming like what was going to become the center of uh of the dot-com boom and i i feel the same way in gaming right now i think so many

interesting things are happening i think you know ar people were talking about it a lot um maybe two or three years ago i feel like they're talking about it less now but finding ways where we can create experiences that are really centered around this device that we all have in our hands every day like we're not trying to replicate the console industry here or at least we're not a jam city we're trying to create products that fit into people's lives that they find delightful and wonderful that might mean shorter sessions that might mean using you know again i mentioned they are using sort of the information collected on your phone on your apple watch on your other devices i just feel like again we're at the very very beginning i want to see where ar goes i want to see where immersive goes i feel like social we talk about it a lot but we're really just at the beginning like seeing myself on a leaderboard fine like working with friends in a battle that that's all wonderful i love it but i feel like it could be ten times deeper everyone talks about the metaverse i think certainly

you know i like it that's good it's like yeah you're joking you think i'm throwing out buzzwords but this is really where things are going and nft is included in that this is the future of monetization and games like i could talk about that for three hours i'm really excited to see how that explains the whole track about that so i'm not going to stretch this way but that is but yeah nfc is a huge thing um i've got i'll i'll come i'll i'm going to jam city now i've got a couple of general questions but i'll come back to them you've kind of answered most things i know you're keen to talk about uh segway into into what you guys are doing and it's very exciting so i mean by all accounts i mean jam city's had an incredible history and an incredible few years and you've been there right from from the off right you're just one of the the the co-founders yeah yeah exactly so it's been incredible is it a decade now is that right longer i can't i we've been around for 15 years so like you're a baby compared to us probably but how long how long what's challenge jam city been around no it's crazy to say it's been 12 years i think when we started it we weren't sure if this was going to be a two or three

year uh gig and we are having such a blast that uh 11 years later i i can still say we're still just at the beginning of this so it's it's really exciting can you tell us a little bit about your your you know your journey so far i mean we don't need to go through it like cat question by accident but i'm quite interested particularly in your kind of approach to growth and m a because you do you you kind of you know you you do have this great habit of bringing in interesting new studios into into the structure i'd be interested in a bit more about about the approach there and how that's going to work so far yeah no it's it's you know our i think our approach is is a little unique i think it fits for us our growth has been about 50 organic and by organic i mean sort of games and we're developing in-house finding great people and empowering them and them creating a wonderful new title and about 50 acquisition so that's usually finding a great title or a great studio acquiring it and bringing it into the company our structure generally is a pretty decentralized we have a very strong core we call jam city live sort

of core central services that's user acquisition that's data that's machine learning that that powers a lot of these games but all of the studios own their own games they're proud of the games they created them they run all the live services so it's almost having like a a family of studios that are all part of uh part of jam city so it's that part of it's great i'll mention also we we started out with much more casual games so yeah you know games like cookie jam generated 850 million in bookings we created it in 2015 panda pops in a similar boat um and we love those titles it's you know these are forever franchises that are going to be around forever but as we for instance acquired a big great studio in in san francisco called tinyco we got into narrative and narrative rpgs so there we created harry potter hogwarts mystery which has been you know a very successful game it was number one in more than 40 countries uh when we launched it in 2018 um and now with the acquisition of ludia we're

again we're getting into ar and we're getting into um puzzle-based rpgs so the idea for us is we're we're not so cocky to think that we can understand and excel in every single genre we're finding people and organizations that are amazing the best at what they do bringing them to the family supporting them from a technical and marketing perspective but letting them run and be the geniuses that they are so you kind of have that you know you're saying you might what my personal trainer says the same you wouldn't believe i've got a personal trainer but i keep this but it's all about strong core right i believe it chris i believe it it's all about the strong core right so what you're saying is that is the genius of jam city uh you know there's many things i'm sure but it's having that really really strong core sort of central system and services that then allows you to just kind of bring in very diff quite different studios and and allow them to to do their thing right so it's it kind of and how was that always the way was that like away from sort of day one or was that something that kind of evolved is that

or was the thought i mean i guess it was a different time 12 years ago right we all the world was different than you know back then it was it's very early early days of app store and everything but yeah well no you know we we we didn't start as a you know an international conglomerate we started as you know three or four uh friends in a coffee shop thinking about the fact that uh mobile games uh were tiny at that point but we thought they could be huge we saw that mobile gaming was very big in asia but it really hadn't gotten a foothold here again remember this is 11 years ago this is right basically when the app store launched and so we we just felt like there was a a wide open uh opportunity here we saw that there were a few little developers here and there but all the product at that point at least we felt was was was not as good as it could be and so we started by and again we were not game experts necessarily at that point by saying we're going to make very simple games we were designing them in-house again like not even game makers

we personally were designing them you know we really understood social because my co-founders were the creators of myspace they understand social media i was going to say that when you were saying just a few friends in a coffee shop like just kids come out of school girl you know what should we get a job at mcmacky d's or should we uh should we put together a game studio yeah we're pretty a pretty impressive uh founding group there but um but yeah but still you know it's a challenge whatever how whatever your history is as you say coming into this is is uh is difficult and you've yeah it's it's very very impressive uh uh achievement definitely so i want to move on like um yeah you talked about um a bit more about ludier before i want to come into that so that's the kind of latest activity really um obviously you i want to tell us tell me about how it all came back because you were how long have you been looking at ludia how many have you been working with them for a while and you kind of had your your kind of eyes on them and and doing cross-promotion or anything what was

that where did that that that come from because it's a pretty big deal um even even in the world of big deals now it's a pretty big deal yeah no i i i appreciate that yeah first just on the deal it's uh we raised uh this is three weeks ago it's fresh in my mind we raised 350 million um uh in funding and and we used about half of that 165 million in the acquisition of ludia and then about ludia we've we've known them for such a long time with you know they basically started when we started 11 years ago they're one of these studios where you know they started out you know making console games and games on facebook uh they got amazing traction with a lot of branded titles like family feud and then most recently you know they have the jurassic world uh titles two of them which which have been wildly successful jurassic world alive it's actually the number two ar game in the world right now i know you mentioned you mentioned that we were chatting about this before i i didn't know that now obviously i can't remember what the number one is i can't imagine but uh

assuming you know i appreciate number one is probably quite a long way away from everyone else but that's that's impressive because there's a lot of people were having a run and i've had to run um there were work walking dead games or a lot of other kind of branded games i didn't realize that the last word was that was so successful i mean i knew it's cool game but that's that's really interesting to to hear and that's new for you right the the ar stuff is a whole new space for jam c yeah it's it's like what i said finding wonderful people who have a really strong core capability in an area we don't and yeah and we actually we're all sitting down to dinner with the uh with the ludia team they came down from montreal to los angeles we had such a wonderful time and we were talking about how they came up how they you know we're taking on these challenges that other people weren't willing to creating that infrastructure to have ar-based games it is not easy it creates it requires incredible technical competence this is such a talented team and then they're also known like jam city for working with big hollywood ips they want to create big worlds

jam city were about 50 50 third-party ip and original ip they're 100 or i shouldn't say 100 they're predominantly third-party ip you know ip their licensing like teenage mutant ninja turtles i mentioned jurassic world we have these amazing dc and star wars games in the pipeline right now that i cannot wait to show to people so anyway the the point have we heard that i didn't is that news i didn't know no no we did we've disclosed that we've been i mean he's accidentally let it slip we've got dc in star wars that dc star wars crossover right that'll be the marvel note definitely definitely not no no no we've shared that we're that we're working on uh on some some wonderful games in in those worlds we haven't disclosed what they are or what they look like or anything like that so that sounds great yeah i want to say brands i will come back leaving this but from a brand perspective it's obviously you're out in you're out in in la there's a lot of brands you know it's a big movie town um

you know is it was it was that always again uh a part of obviously you have your own ips have been built as well you see like you said kind of cookie jam and and panda pop and and things like world war i committed now was that always you said it was like 50 was it were brands of brands always been part of the plan and part of the picture i mean why is it why why the brand focus you know honestly it came up a bit organically my background is actually in um traditional entertainment i worked at viacom i worked at univision i i spent you know the way chris and i met my co-founder is we were both working at fox uh uh i worked on the acquisition of myspace which was chris's company the social network from the dark age it's been a long it's been a long time i i don't know if all of your uh if your lovely viewers uh uh we're around them but uh everyone still uses myspace it's still it's still there but but chris and his team they just understood social inside and out they're also

amazing entrepreneurs and so the the whole point is we felt like we're coming into something that that that really really had legs and so uh that that's that's how it all began yeah i know that that's that's fantastic and the brand stuff yeah you just you that's yours yeah your that's partly your you know your own experience i guess from from you know uh sort of chris knows we're working with big brands that's i mean it's it's like you say your balance you've got not all brands you've got your own ip but you're also working with brands as well it's an interesting uh it's a smart approach i think because you know yeah yeah sorry sorry i i just remembered i lost track and i didn't finish that part of the question which is to say we were both at fox you know we were we've been part of entertainment companies we know it inside it out we know the power of these worlds i also think the ip holders you know they know that they're gonna they have a lot of viewers and fans who enjoy their ip you know through books or through tv or through film the idea that um they could actually have even more viewership

more hours per day of their fans enjoying their characters in mobile games it's it's it's it seems more obvious now i mean if you think about you know a film you're you know that's two hours once a year let's say in your favorite ip if you think about a television show maybe that's an hour uh a week a game people are spending on average for instance you know our players spend between 35 and 45 minutes in each one of our games every day like they're they're it's a big part of their life just like yeah they might spend time with their friends yeah i haven't you haven't thought about that that's a fair point you're yeah that's i don't even ever thought about that way before that's a very good point you yeah i love you know i love particular brands of tv shows and films and you know i'll i'll go you know watch latest iterations in those universes but yeah from a games perspective especially mobile i i will find myself playing the same things you know just checking in every day that's yeah okay so from a brand perspective it's a no-brainer right this is an engagement it's amazing for the brands

and it's amazing for us where we can establish a world and go out with it people know what to expect when we launch harry potter hogwarts mystery for instance narrative rpg the movies are no longer out there no longer sorry the movies are certainly out but there are no new movies there are no they've got their thing now they've got the new one they fantastic beasts are still going on exactly but but if you want to be at hogwarts if you want to live out the fantasy of uh of being a student hogwarts and following um all those wonderful uh characters that you've come to know and love our game has become the way to continue to enjoy those worlds and those stories and so we love that so you're jumping into it you have expectations you know what to expect from that universe and we can jump right into the fun of the game versus having to establish here's where you are here's why let's start over and again we do that with a lot of our original ips we love to do that but it's such a luxury to be able to have people come in day one or even see an ad and really have a sense of what to what to expect from that world it's so much fun

we love doing it we're going to continue to do it in the future we expect ips to be a third-party ips i should say at least 50 of our game mix um yeah i mean i don't think that makes sense i mean i think it's i think there was a time certainly in the games industry and similar the console games industry where a licensed ip was almost a death knell for the quality of the game it was just like oh there's a new film coming out right let's let's someone's got the ip about six months before the film's due to come out quickly try and wrap that ip around a generic game and do your best and it it was it took a while i think the i mean some of the argument that the batman games from console kind of started to turn that around but but yeah obviously it's nowadays it's not that way and it's much more integrated you see people you know sort of games not being part of the universe as a story necessarily but in certainly integrated wellness and marketing campaigns and uh yeah and as you say if you've got that touch point it makes a lot of sense for the brand uh brand holders as well well i think that i think the ip holders get that and i

think for a long time they were either holding off from games or because of the exact reasons you said nobody wants a brand slap and so i think the reason that jam city and i i don't mean to tout our own horn but we've really been careful too away we've become like between jam city and now adding literature to that we've become if not the partner of choice for hollywood studios one of the top partners of stores because we create these immersive narrative-rich games around these brands we do not treat them as brand slaps we spend you know two years creating a really wonderful game not to just like get that quick burst of of players but to create experiences that our players can enjoy for years and years and years so in again in harry potter hogwarts mystery and our disney emoji blitz game and our family game you can go down the line each of these games have new content we're dropping every week so new characters new levels new uh new adventures

this is this is the opposite of a brand slap we're trying to create an iconic uh evergreen experience that people can enjoy for years and years and years and literally we have players and i'll start with cookie jam that joined in 2014 2015 that are still a large part of our user base yeah and we're seeing the exact same thing in our uh in our licensed ip games too like harry potter and disney um i'm i've got a few more questions i might try and bring a few from the audience here i'm not good i'm not gonna throw anything all forward here but there's a guy that's one from phil jones who i always pick out the ones that give their name first because that's uh he says he says you were talking about brands he goes naturally i won't ask you to name them but have you ever produced a great game only for the iep to be poorly received by audiences i don't know if he means whether you produced a game around an ip and the ip itself is a struggle or whether you produced a game where you know maybe the existing audience isn't quite as on board as that ever happened or have you seen that happen take it outside of jam city maybe yeah no no i'll i'll it's a good question

i'll tackle both of them first with original ips we've a hundred percent had uh situations where we've come up with worlds and characters that we've fallen in love with ourselves um but haven't necessarily resonated in the market this is the nature of the entertainment business every ip you create doesn't become a a big hit um you know you think you're learning a lot you take your lessons from each one but i i'd say you know in the industry it's probably one in 20 new game that works on making up that term but it's like a very low percentage at jam city it's much higher but you still definitely have games that you put your heart and soul into that don't end up being wildly successful in terms of licensing ip i have to say that it's a much more known quantity in that situation where you uh you understand the size of the fan base what they're looking for we have an amazing consumer insights group by the way which is always testing and making sure that we're fulfilling sort of the fan wants and needs yeah so with with licensed ip i'm trying i'm trying to think we had we had a marvel game that didn't get it was a

delightful game marvel avengers academy that we thought uh was going to be larger than it was it ended up it was sort of this fantasy of your uh uh the all the all your marvel you know iron man and the hulk and all these characters as teenagers in high school with them and it and and that fantasy didn't resonate like we thought it would but you know we tried so sometimes you try things that are a little out there there's a lot there's a lot of more it's tough there's a lot of marvel games out there as well there's a lot of marvel films at the moment as that's one every week coming out um which is good i like um so there's a question here something i wanted to come back from a technology perspective you're very excited about uh the prospects of ar um with um with ladies and and and you clearly see that as a big future what about do you have any interest in in vr or combine you know xr i guess is do you say ar and vr completely different and and you know from a technology perspective where you know what how do you feel about those two spaces where do you think we're all going to be having you know replacing our phones or

augmenting our phones with with a sort of something some sort of ar experience going forward or will we have glasses uh guys there's a lot of questions by the way take ten questions in one yeah pick one of those questions and ignore the rest what was easiest the people i remember when we started in mobile gaming people were like oh my god is mobile gaming going to kill console and pc gaming i i love console and pc games the answer is like absolutely not there's a wonderful opportunity for people to enjoy console and pc games and they're going to continue to enjoy them even if mobile games are wildly successful because they're fulfilling different needs different parts of people's lives is i love vr we're not making vr games i think it's amazing it's a completely different experience where you're right now you know you have to usually you're in your living room you're plugged in it's much longer sessions you're it's by definition an immersive experience that's that's great

it's not instead of most of the mobile no no it's very different for us and i mentioned this before we're trying to make the most of this mobile device that you're carrying in your hands and your wearable devices that you're that that you're taking with you day-to-day so i want shorter sessions i want quick snappy gameplay in a lot of cases i wanna i don't want like i'm not trying to create an immersive world i'm trying to have you uh have a more personal intimate small experience and you may call it a casual game which i think is dismissive because it can be very deep and rich but it's it's it's smaller it's often more tactile we're touching the screen i think it's just a completely different experience i don't think it's one or the other we we love them all and ar is the same thing that's why we love ar it's taking advantage of this device that's core to our lives you can go around with it you can do it safely um you can have a lot of fun with it and the and the sessions work perfectly with the sessions they're having in our other mobile games and when apple bring out their ar glasses you'll be ideally positioned no comment so

we're all waiting we're all waiting to see what they do they keep they keep hitting it and nothing much has happened yet um on that point one of my questions i i didn't ask is this kind of related to that you said you're not making vr games i i've seen a a trend for mobile publishers to start looking outside of mobile recently um i think zynga and uh we're looking at a console game for their new star wars thing and scopely uh looking at bringing their star trek thing to pc and is that something that that you know that you're even considering at jam city are you very much mobile mobile mobile yeah and so specifically mobile to pc and to some consoles we're already doing it i mean we don't really talk about it but a lot of our games you can already play on console either on via facebook or on uh separate uh sites or experiences look there there's no reason why if you're having a wonderful time on your game on your mobile game that you can't also enjoy it uh on a pc like we think

like let's make it easier for people to get into and enjoy our wonderful games the i will say that a lot of the games we make though like if you're running around chasing dinosaurs trying to collect them it's not going to work very well on a pc if you're you know playing cookie jam and and having fun with these puzzle pieces it works better on a screen so a lot of our i'd say much more than 90 of our usage tends to come from mobile certain games like you know harder core or deeper sort of forex type of games i think work better on um on pc and so we're going to continue to make a lot of our games available on pc and we think that's an important thing to do it's another revenue stream it's making a better experience for your player we love it but it's not the main focus of our business or the types of games we're making fair enough we've got about three or four minutes we started late when we finished late don't worry but i'm gonna try and squeeze in three questions because you know i like a lot of questions so one's really super quick and then which is from the audience i'm gonna get into two final ones of mine uh super quick one from the audience is

from alyosha sorry which i pronounced correctly what is your favorite original ip i know that's personal or be yours gameplay go with you you would think i would want to push one of my own games but i have to say you you once you pick one of your favorite children everyone else hates you so um i i love all the original ids we've created equally um in terms of uh third-party i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna make it a little bit more specific uh just to sort of um there's so many ips i love it would be hard to say like my favorite original ip in the world my favorite mobile ip that that surprised me to death and i never expected it oh god there's several of them this is a tough one so in terms of like casual tangible like wonderful games um uh monument valley still like touches my heart like the beauty of these little

characters the minimalist world like i think there should be 20 games done in the same style with the same little characters that convey the same like power i just think it's so wonderful i think there are also like with newer up-and-coming developers what you know one that just got acquired um there's wonderful like uh mystery and deeper narrative games that are coming out there's several uh that um somebody i i don't i don't want to get too deep promoted that's okay no but but there's really really cool i feel like like diving into what mystery can be especially on a on a mobile game it's just um really exciting and i think some of uh some some great developers are doing that right now okay so final final two part question is um which i think i think are connected what what is it you look for when acquiring a studio because you've obviously like is there a is there a jam city type of of people and and and sort of adjunct to that and kind of related i

guess is is where where next what's the what's the you know you were you were kind of on the verge of of kind of floating rice back and then you've you know that might change a bit and you did you know you just pulled some money out of that behind the sofa so it didn't need to so what what's what's next and what sort of companies i presume you're going to acquire more companies what sort of companies are you looking for and where next easy questions chris you're so good at putting 10 questions into one question i don't even i don't even remember where to begin but i'll say first in terms of the studios we're looking at um i'd say it starts with the people so if you look across jam city i'd say that the the characteristic that resonates most is this sense of curiosity i think people that work here who are part part of the jam city family really feel like this is not a place about like yelling and driving and like making people feel bad about you know things that are working or not working this is a place where we're all so curious if you're not trying to learn something new

every day if you're not trying to get great at the particular type of game you're at it's probably not the right place if you're a scholar of your genre of games and you're good at them and you know what you're talking about and you're excited to come in every day and you know our life's too short we could work on anything to come in and work on these games that are meaningful to you that's the type of person we want that's the type of team we want if you look at all the acquisitions we've done maybe not all not 95 of them the original founding team's still here because they know that and they come here not because they want to sell out of their game and get the heck out they come here because they feel like they're going to thrive here they're going to be able to create a much more successful game than they wouldn't have otherwise and that's why we've two or three x all the titles that we've acquired it's nice if the genre is adjacent it doesn't need to be we're trying to learn and bring other folks in other teams in that are making us bigger and better and teach us things that we don't already know and those people hopefully want to learn from what we have here as well and together we we we hope we can make something much bigger

and much more successful than we already have i mentioned before we raised 350 million we have we have an opportunity to do a lot more acquisitions than we've already done we're always looking for great talented teams wonderful people titles that are ready to launch or um or games that are in process or games that have been around for a while and maybe need that central services user acquisition capability and it would be a good fit from a cross-promotional perspective with what we already have so that's the long answer fantastic that was absolutely absolutely brilliant and and uh there's something you picked up there which has given me an idea to give you for your next brand be be curious not judgmental you know who says that cool ted lasso get him in the game he's the hottest couple of him he's the hottest guy at the moment uh absolutely love that tv show uh he's he's great but thank you so much for the uh for sharing so much about what jameson you're doing it's really fascinating to watch and we keep we'll keep watching keenly and keep

hoping for for more more success more exciting things to come on keep an eye on the uh on the ar output definitely with from you guys and ludia thank you for your time this morning uh joshua let me go off and go for enjoy the l.a sunshine whatever you're doing this morning chris you're so much fun thank you for having me i really loved this happy to have conversations like this anytime cool thanks well we'll have you back again don't worry cheers cheers your shirt thank you everyone bye-bye what a brilliant start what absolutely brilliant starts