Surviving "extinction events" in the games industry with Tyranno Studios' Michael Rubinelli

Hello and welcome to the Pocket Gamer.biz podcast. I'm Craig Chapel, the head of content at pocketgamer.biz, and I'm your host for today. We're doing something slightly different today. We still have the lucky Peggy doing fantastic interviews for us, but I I'll be picking up more video content into the next year. uh so you get even more insightful interviews to watch and listen to with industry experts on the hottest trends. So today we've got Michael Rubinelli, the chief gaming officer at Tyrano Studios, which rebranded from WAX Studios a few years back. Now the team is gearing up for the launch of Spin Tycoon, a new PvP strategy game for mobile. Michael has extensive industry experience across Disney, EA, Mattil, and others. So, I thought it'd be great to get him on the show as we close the year and get his thoughts on recent industry trends and how companies could navigate them and how they've also done so in the past too. So, without further ado, welcome

Michael to the show. How are you doing?
I'm amazing Craig. You know, it's a Friday and we get to talk gaming. I mean, what could be better?
It's a perfect way to end the week, honestly.
Indeed.
So, could you give me a bit more of a detailed intro on your extensive background in games and what you're up to right now? Yeah, I've I've done this for a little bit or my entire adult life, if you will. Not to age myself, but I did start back at Electronic Arts in the early 90s making John Madden football. And that was kind of how I was kind of, you know, educated or brought up into the world of gaming. I had a dream. I thought I could do this. Nobody told me I couldn't. And a EA took a chance on me. And, you know, lo and behold, uh, you know, here I am. I've went from EA and being a designer on Madden and a bunch of EA sports titles to uh you know running worldwide product development at THQ. I was at Capcom Midway as you mentioned as well. And then in 2010, um, I was thinking about building my own startup and I went to a guy named Nick Earl who ran kind of all West Coast or North American Studios,

Electronic Arts, and he's a friend of mine and we were talking back and forth about kind of building studios and, you know, we've kind of always mentored each other throughout our careers and he said, "You should go talk to a guy named John Pleasants who's building social games on Facebook at a company called Platom." And I said, "I have no idea what you just said." Like, it might as well have been Inllgon. I'm like, "Social games on Facebook? John? What?" He's like, "Trust me." He said, "Even if you don't like the job or you're right for the role, it'll be the best day of your life." So, that was a real kind of high praise. I said, "Okay, I'm going to go investigate this John Pleasants guy." And come to find out John Pleasants is maybe one of the greatest people I've ever worked with. And I went to play him and kind of my freetoplay career took off from there.
So, you probably answered my first question a little bit there. You've been you've obviously been through a few industry shifts and trends and you mentioned play.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, as the industry
all all of them, right? So, as the industry I mean there's many trends before these ones I've got to say but I will be here all day if I name them all. We've moved in kind of browser casual uh mobile freeto play live ops games as a service web free
moving to AI now. What are some of the

more dramatic shifts that you remember that shook up the industry that you were part of?
Yeah, there's a bunch. They're really really clear and you can do it by kind of by platform, right? So, if you look at kind of the the regular Nintendo, the Super Nintendo, and the Genesis at the time or Mega Drive, those are all kind of 2D kind of action and sports games. And then with the advent of, you know, N64, PlayStation 1, it became all about 3D gaming. Like, that was a huge shift, 2D to 3D. And it's like, wow, cool. And then PC was kind of experimenting with, you know, land play. And, you know, you look at Doom, you look at, you know, games like Command and Conquer, all of a sudden multiplayer became this huge trend then in kind of the late 90s. And so, you go 2D to 3D to uh online to multiplayer to freeto play to mobile to web 3 to live ops and like those are kind of the big tent poles, if you will. And I think the interesting thing that I've always noticed is that and it's really clear like you can look at history there is a road map that shows you how these things work. business model slashplatform transitions are

extinction events for companies, right? How many great companies made games for the regular Nintendo or Super Nintendo that aren't in business anymore? They couldn't make that shift, right? and going from, you know, 3D to online multiplayer, you know, couldn't make the shift, couldn't make the jump, you know, and because these platform transitions and business model evolutions are extinction events, we know that as a species, like our 2 million-year-old survival software, which is our brain, which protects us from ourselves, right? Like, oh, that transcript is going to eat me. I better run away. We are wired to survive, right? So, failure or fear of loss is a huge motivator. And extinction events like business model transitions are scary. And if you can't handle that, you're not going to take the risk. Well, you're also not going to thrive. You're not going to survive. You're not going to move forward. And so, a lot of times these shifts keep people on the sidelines and it ends up costing them.
So, yeah, we we we saw that a lot with web 3 to play. Same. I I I went back to Nick after we had a lot of success at play and I said, "You should be in the freeto play space." And he said, "Why?"

I said, "Because it's going to be all the rage." He said, "Okay, let me get this straight. you spend what half a million to a million dollars in development back then. I said, "Yeah, sometimes less." He goes, "Okay, you have no pre-sales because back in the day on console and disc and, you know, what have you, you had your pre-sales, right, at at all the various software stores, which drove a lot of your marketing activities. So, you have you have you spend money, you've got no sales up front. People can download and or play the game for free." Yep. And when they pay you, they pay you 25 cents or maybe 99 cents. Yep. And they don't all pay you. About 1% pay you. Yep. And you think that's a scalable business model? I said, "I do." He's like, "You're crazy." like they don't see it, they don't get it. And it takes somebody to lead the way. So if you look at freeto play, right? What companies were born out of freeto play? Zinga, Scoply, King, some of the biggest brands in the world, you know, multi-billion dollar revenue generating companies were there first, not because they were better at it, but because they were built for it. They were wired for it, and they knew how to lead the way. And then once they saw that it worked, everybody else shifted. And I'll leave you with one interesting anecdote from uh from the EA example. So, there was a group called EA

Partners that used to take on kind of third-party titles. They would look at how do we kind of feather fill out our portfolio with titles that we don't build. There was a game called Simpsons tapped out and it was like 9 to 12 people somewhere in I want to say northeastern Canada that were building it. EA had procured the license from Matt Graing and and that that studio. But this group had a game and it was, you know, on iOS and iPad and it was, you know, a few hundred,000 to build whatever it was. like it wasn't a lot and it was throwing off half a million to a million dollars a day in cash when EA had no expectation for it and they're like wait a minute how how does this work and so they went in they did a deep dive and they said and I think they kind of saw the light there but it took a product that they had very kind of like they had no aspiration or no ambitions for to really break out and say this is the model like you should understand that there is a path here economically viable path that your consumers want to take and so that was a real eye openening moment for them
so uh this leads nicely into the next questions I had actually when you were

at Playdon and you're building kind of social free to play games for social networks.
That's pretty new at the time, right? And as you were saying, you know, what is what is free to play? People are like asking and you were like, what did you say to me? And then uh and it was like but what is it like getting into those areas that are quite nent?
It's ter it's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying. So let me tell you what my experience was. So I had I had like my entire career like growing, evolving, a lot of commercial success, a lot of critical success because I was the target audience for what I built. John Madden football, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, on and on and on. Like all these very blue, very aggressive games, PvP, sports related, what have you, or action games about cutting people's heads off, showing their spine still attached. Like those kind of moments really resonated with me for better, for worse. like, okay, I know what to build because I'm my audience and my taste informed the product and creative decisions, the feature set, what have you. Right? That's real straightforward, real simple. I got to play them and it was a bunch of, you know, Stanford grad kids going speaking a language in and

acronyms that I had like, you know, you know, CAC and, you know, DAU and ARPD and LTV. And I'm just like, I don't like I didn't understand this dialect. So right away I kind of felt and I wasn't that old you know and but these young kids are talking to mile minute speaking a language that I or a dialect that I did not understand and I said well great let's talk about the kind of games we build like oh we build games for you know Midwestern housewives and I'm like oh boy I don't do that and I don't speak the language that you speak I have no idea like I literally I I'll never forget I came home after a few days I the end of my first week and I told my wife said I'm pretty sure they're going to fire me in a week or two because I don't make these games. I don't speak their language and I have no idea what they're talking about. She said, "Look, you're smart guy. You kind of always figure it out. Keep your head down. Ask the right questions. You know, you know, don't break too many eggs when you don't know what you're doing." And she was right. After about kind of six to eight weeks, I had this real epiphany like, "Oh, it's totally freeing operating off of analytics, right?" Like, you can't have a game that's purely about like, oh, here are all the best practices when it comes to monetization, retention, engagement, and verality. Like, you

can't do that. If you go too far, if you overcorrect and you go too far to the side of the science and you don't embrace the art, you're going to fail. certainly played him had several of those experiences like it's just all best practices therefore we win and that was the naive of the company at the time because a bunch of young kids that didn't have the scar tissue of building games that were actually enjoyable to play I think they looked at games like you know Farmville and Mafia Wars and said oh these are just verality optimization exercises they're not actual games or software toys and to a large extent that was relatively true but there still had to be a joy in the interactivity and so once you have that notion that you can operate with freedom and know that you can get immediate feedback on whether what you put out there is enjoyable or not. Like at EA, we would run a focus group. We'd get, you know, 20 people in a room. We'd feed them a bunch of pizza. We'd say, "Hey, here's the latest Madden. What do you think?" They're like, "And and by the way, when you leave, you get a free game." The 20 people like, "We love it." I'm like, "Of course you do. We just gave you pizza. You're on our campus and you get a free game." You know, there's they're total selection bias. But at play, we're like, "Okay, let's run a test with 40,000 people that we don't

know who they are and let's just see what they do." It was this real freeing notion of okay I see here they like this they didn't like that they churned here or they doubled down there and it became this like now it doesn't matter what I know it only matters what I can prove and operating with that mindset became really freeing it actually encouraged you to test worse things sooner if that makes any sense like really really crude pre-alpha it's just a core loop it's placeholder text it's placeholder art but you can get a signal relative to other games in a similar state so it's initially terrifying but it's ultimately freeing in fact I I called up Nick later and said Like if you don't embrace free to play in 18 months, you're a dinosaur because this is where the world is going. I assure you. And in fact, Disney bought Platum for that that kind of that that muscle memory or that training if you will. They didn't have it. And at the time when the purchase was made in 2010, Bob Iger had announced his retirement. And like a lot of CEOs, they worry about their legacy, right? I don't know if you remember 2013, I'm retiring. It's like, okay, Bob, thank you. And he his whole charter then was I'm going to

transition Disney from old media to new digital, right? And so you you know Disney Plus came out of you know Bob Iger and every everything that we did Disney would inbed different groups in our studio and they would be a PM for a week. Animation Alani Disney Cruise Lines ABC studio like it didn't matter that they didn't build games. They were brought in to understand dashboards, tickers, AB testing, live ops, like all these things because he knew that he wanted to move the company to that kind of mindset that fast fail. Let's let's operate off of, you know, business intelligence and understand telemetry. And it was fascinating. The Disney people would come out of those oneweek kind of training seminars where they would actually, you know, launch a feature and look at its performance and then triage that feature. this is the best week of my life because you're taking these people that are stuck in their ways theoretically and now you're showing look you're now adaptable right now you two are future proof you can now operate and speak this language just like the rest of us do it was wonderful
a couple uh follow-ups there one thing I was thinking about was like if you're a big publisher and you kind of slow

moving that was that's actually a really interesting way that you were saying there to kind of adapt to new tech which is actually just have people across the company even if it's slightly different area joining a team for a week and just learning And then the other thing I wanted to follow up this I kind of wanted to say like how how do you build a new company and build that expertise for something that's new which you kind of answered but is it like you're you're you're creating new ways to work with a new business model. So, you're kind of using what you know, but you also have to think, well, how do I do something new? If that makes sense.
Yeah. I mean, you know what's what's really interesting to me is the way that I I look at it. Look, I know it's kind of, you know, a lot of people like to quote Steve Jobs and they they hold him up as the example for certain things. But he said something to me that I've always kind of latched on to really smart back in the late '9s. He was at a WWDC and he said, you know, you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology, right? He said a lot of people, you know, they start with the technology and try to figure out where they're going to sell and he goes on and say, "I'm more guilty of this than anybody." A lot of people

say, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if we built this thing?" opposed to saying, "What does the customer need? What does the customer want?" Like, what is the problem we're trying to solve? What is their friction is the kind of the thing that that doesn't allow them to live or operate or do the things they want and then let's build that, right? Anytime I look at building a company or I build a feature or I build a product, you have to start with what problem for the consumer are we solving? And if you if it's a big enough problem and you have an elegant enough solution that you feel like is is novel, then that is a path worth going down. You can't build vanity tech just because you like it. You can't build vanity tech just because you can. You can't have these pet projects or passion projects that don't have, you know, a a really meaningful use case. And so you have to be really objectively honest with yourself about, okay, great. I have a passion for doing this and I love it, but will anybody else? And I think that's where a lot of people fail because they so fall in love with their ideas. You know, to put a finer point on that, a lot of people say, "Oh, follow your passion." Like, that's how you'll be successful. But I think lately I've heard a lot of like don't follow your

passion. Like that's a terrible idea. Follow whatever it is that you're great at, right? Whatever you think you're the best in the world at, like that's the path you should go down, that's what you should pursue. So when it comes to, you know, building a company or building a feature or doing something meaningful, if you are objectively great at it, then you should go ahead and pursue that. Don't chase a dream because the dream may lead you to nowhere
at companies that you've worked at. So we're talking about Playdoom. You were kind of getting in on something new. So you creating these new business models and that what do you do if you're at a company that isn't an early mover, but you want to get in on something new. So the the example that kind of comes to my mind is I don't know if you're a like Supercell got in early on freeto play, right? But if you're a ROIO and a Zinga, sorry, mobile freeto play specifically. If you're a ROIO and a Zingga, you you're a bit late to that and then you spend years actually restructuring your entire business. Yeah. I I guess how do you adapt to something new when when you've already got like this solid business?
Well, let's let's take those three

examples because I know those those business cases and I know the people who run those companies very well. Roovio, the founder, is family funded and they shipped 16 games before Angry Birds. They were all abject failures, right? But the guy who founded, his father was well to do and they just happened to just hit their stride with Angry Birds. It was it was not like, oh, they were so close and it was great and they just finally like, you know, were discovered. Like, no, it was a lot of luck. And then if you look at the follow-ups that Robio had, you know, they weren't great. Now they've found their way, right? But it wasn't like this obvious aha epiphany moment like that's what Roio did that nobody else did. Like even they struggled, right? And that's kind of the point. Even they struggled. If you look at Supercell, Supercell famously copied and cloned Zingga and Kicks. Supercell's two biggest games initially were Payday, right, which is a Farmville knockoff and Farmville was a knockoff of the Chinese game. So it's all copy and clone, right? But that's where live ops and free to play comes in. So it's that's an interesting evolution. You can do an hour just on kind of the the farming game
Oh god. Absolutely.
World. But you know, if you look at

Clash of Clans, which was massive, like people are like, "Oh, this game is so incredible." like, yeah, it's called Backyard Monsters and Kicksai did it on Facebook, but Kicksai was too slow to pivot. Like we said, platform transitions are are extinction events. Kicksai was too slow to pivot to freeto-play mobile and it birthed a whole entire company and a whole entire industry. Like you can literally map the hit points, the unit utility, the barriers, like the the base growth that lives in Clash of Clans to the latest version of Backyard Monsters. And back monsters was brilliant, but it only lived, you know, in Java or in Flash, excuse me, on Facebook and that's all it was. And Battle Pirates was the other huge, you know, kickside game. You know, they tried to do something similar at Supercell with Boom Beach, which wasn't as successful because it wasn't quite, you know, architected the same way. Um, we I think a lot of times we want to think that these companies are, you know, great and they're forward thinkers and but they're opportunists, right? And so Zinga eventually moved into free to play. If you look at Zinga Poker, it's still massively popular. If you look at Empire and Puzzles that they have now,

that's just a ripoff of Puzzles and Dragons. But again, it's really well executed. It's really well live operating. And that's what Zingga's super strength is. They are the best kind of live operators in the world in terms of their audience, in terms of reality, in terms of monetization. Like, they are so good at that, but they're not forward thinkers, right? They're not, you know, in fact, when they've gone out of their way to be creative and clever, and they have very creative and clever people there, you know, those things haven't done as well. So I think to answer your question, what have they done is that they have figured out what they're really really good at, what their strengths are, and they play to their strengths and they've saw that from an opportunistic standpoint.
Yeah.
You know, Supercell said, "Here's great games on Facebook that aren't going to mobile. We'll be first movers to mobile." Great. Zingga, you know, we're going to dominate, you know, World Series of Poker is huge. We're going to dominate on Facebook and then we're going to bring that to mobile. And then Roio, again, physics-based puzzle games on the mobile device as their 16th entry into the market. Finally worked for them. Good for them.
So, we're talking about uh Extinction Event Extinction event. But
do you think what do you think is

actually better? A first mover advantage or a second mover advantage? You let someone else fail?
It great question. Depends on your scale, right? If you're a small company, it's you and three of your buddies and you're working out of your garage and you're working for free or at a discount, you can take that first mover shot because your upside is huge.
If you are an EA or if you are an Activision or other companies that are typically kind of acquired, they're not builders, they're buyers, right? They don't have like for something to work for them, it's got to work at scale. Like there was a point in time at EA where they weren't greenlighting anything that didn't have a billion dollar revenue potential because the infrastructure, the support, the machinery was such that it wouldn't allow them to model out like yes, let's greenlight this game. Like look, it's not going to make a billion dollars. It's not worth our time, right? And a lot of people have these problems of things don't work at scale. So depending on where you're at in your company's life cycle, where you're at in your company's growth, like I think that that's why the first mover advantages come from these really hungry, really aggressive folks because they have a lot

less to lose. We talk about fear of loss as the motivator. You'd want it to be hope for gain, but it's fear of loss. And so, um, you know, fear of loss motivates EA to be a second mover and to have all these companies be second movers. Whereas, if you don't have that much to lose because you're a couple guys with a dream, great, knock yourselves out.
It actually uh just from the one example, an industry example I guess of of Supercell, it actually feels like they did both. So, they were first mover to mobile, but they were second mover to the genres that they took advantage of, which
Yeah. Again, I think that they said, "Here's something that people like to do, but they don't get to do it here, right?" Like, it was really opportunistic. It was really smart. And they weren't a huge company at the time. And then if you look at everything they tried creatively after that, with the exception of Clash Royale, which is just brilliant. I mean, Clash Royale to this day still, I think, is one of the best kind of original, you know, strategy games on mobile. I think the charts would bear that out. I still think it's in the top 10 today. You know what?
It had a big resurgence recently.
Yeah, I'm I'm sure it did. They're so good at building community. They're so good at, you know, making sure that the meta is adjusted constantly. I mean,

they're they're really wonderful people. But if you look at how long I mean, as good as Supercell is, look at how long it took to, you know, get Brawl Stars going. Like Brawl Stars, clever creative idea, you know, threeon-ree, you know, matchups. But it was like two years. And they had, I think it was what, April of 2024, like two and a half years after they launched was their largest revenue month in their entire history. And it wasn't like just creeping up for two and a half years. No, it had this like they figured something out, right? They're like the community loves this plus this plus this. This has really unlocked it for us. So, you can be a market leader and still not always know the lessons because tastes shift and everything shifts and it it's not uh it's not blue ocean or uh you know, blue skies, so to speak. It's it's it's really messy out there. I remember Brawl Stars very well covering it for the couple years and I went to the studio for the launch and then it was actually
probably it's I think it was actually like five I want to say five at least five years later that that was the record revenue.
Right. Right. He said he'd never seen

that before any company.
Right. And you'd think well well it's Supercell. Shouldn't they have seen that more than sooner than 5 years out? But it's it's surprising what we learn about the evershifting taste of players. And like one trend I think that is really hard for a lot of traditional game makers to make when they shift to mobile is in the old console days the behavior was this is the big Q4 title. I'm going to buy, you know, Resi4, Resi 5, like I'm going to play that, I'm going to finish it, then I'm going to move on to this game then and then it's the falls. I'm going to buy the latest Madden or the latest whatever. Like and you play games for three or four quarters at a time. But this online persistence became a huge thing. Like even with Uncharted, which is a great oneplayer game in the Uncharted series, there's a great multiplayer component that after you finish the story, like that has bled over into mobile. And now when you look at the charts, I kid you not, I believe the number one strategy game on the mobile charts today on the app store is Clash of Clans, 13 years old. It's not like, and then there's a bunch of new entries. Like, no. If you look at the average age since launch of the games at the top of the app store, they're all 5, 10, 12 years old. like it's hard to

break in because people are playing fewer games for much longer periods of time and that's an adjustment economically that companies have to make. You know, it used to be like we're only competing with this fourth quarter release. Like, no, you're not. You're competing with something that came out 10 years ago and it's got a well- entrenched audience and they spent a lot of money, so they're not going to leave their account anytime soon because they're very vested and on and on and on. That's kind of the downside of freetoplay gaming is that a lot of people are retained through guilt. Like, well, I spent this much, I can't quit now. not like, oh, I've got 12 years of innovation and 12 years of great memories. It's like, no, I've got 12 years of spending, so therefore I can't quit. I'm pot committed, if you will, right? And that's kind of the the downside. And I think that's where Web 3 is a nice kind of potential release, if you will, for those players. They now feel good about monetizing because they can sell their stuff or they can sell their account, even if it's pennies on the dollar. It's a zero sum game currently, and it doesn't need to be.
All right, we'll go on to web three in a second.
Yeah. Yeah. No, let's stay right here. Yeah,
I'll push back a little bit on the uh it is obviously it is true that you know

old games particular mobile are the ones that people still play now. I think in strategy there's been a bit of innovation recently. So games like um uh first funds last war century games is white out survival. If you're looking at 4x uh a bit different from build battle I guess clash clans but like they're now like the top games by far and then they blend like other gameplay styles right like from hyper casual but Clash Clans does still do very well.
Yeah. If you look at the top 10 in the app store I think four of the top 10 games have survival somewhere in their title. Like survival as a category is actually massive. To your point, it used to be just, you know, in the old days, right? It was just, oh, what's your survival horror game, right? It was Silent Hill. It was Resident Evil, and that was a genre. Now, it's just survival, right? It doesn't matter if it's zombies, it doesn't matter if it's white out, it doesn't matter if it's Last War. Like, survival is a whole kind of thing. And I think that that I mean if you look at Clash of Clans, Sheen Zone, you look at Rise of Kingdoms, that

was kind of what the strategy ilk was for, you know, from 2012 to 2019. And then of late, you know, these survival themed games have really gotten a foothold, which is nice to see because you do like to see new ideas come to the four. And it's a it's a perfect play pattern for the mobile gamer, right? I can play for five minutes or I can play for an hour and I, you know, I don't fall behind. I have the enjoyment the whole time which is kind of what to me is the benchmark of is this a good use of my time.
So uh we mentioned web 3. So you worked at uh wax so is like a rebrand of of wax studio I think. So I guess how did you feel about the earlier opportunities in the space and where do you think things are now? Cuz I think for all of the investment that there has been it's not really taken off.
Oh boy. How many hours do we have to discuss this topic? Seven or eight. Okay I'll start. Look, a lot of the things that I didn't understand about freeto play when I started that I learned very quickly were empowering. I felt those same pulls to to pay to earn or P2E or

web 3, if you will. This whole notion of I've bought this stuff that I own that I have full control over and it may appreciate, it may depreciate, but I own it, right? Therefore, I don't feel bad about spending it because I can give it to a friend of mine to play or I can sell it for, like I said, cents on the dollar. I'm not pot committed, so to speak. I'm not super pregnant with I felt like I understood the value in that quite a bit. Yeah. I was a person who bought a lot of gold in World of Warcraft and EverQuest and, you know, Diablo. I hate to say and Diablo mobile initially. Was it D? One of the three, but had the auction house in Diablo. Like I I bought the currency free, I want to say.
Yeah, I want to say as well. But the point was like I could spend in any of those games two hours doing my daily quest and get three million gold or I could spend $2 and get three million gold and not have to do the daily quests. Like my time, my free time to play the game that I love was worth way more than spending my free time grinding to get the currency then I play the game that I love. So I understood that kind of that that tension. And that's what,

you know, web 3 is all about is you can mine a currency and sell it to somebody else. is basically legitimized gold farming and now there's NFTTS like okay you have something that's unique we have provenance we can show you we can show you the title we can convey these things to a community we have marketplaces set up we have wallets that have ownership uh you know control with uh you know where you're custodial of your keys and what like there's all these things that were set up to really empower the player to have more agency and control over what they did so that just as a construct was really appealing to me and I get it and when I was first brought in to WAX, one of the things I said, well, all my friends in the industry that are publishers should embrace this. Like this was when like, you know, Axi and I'm like, yeah, that's not really a game and that's I think that's built on a kind of a foundation of saying it's all going to collapse because there's no real utility there. There's no real enjoyment there. There's no real progression there. It's just, you know, if you have something that you can sell to somebody that, you know, if there's

more suckers than you, you're in good shape, right? Right. But I'll never forget around that time, 2021, early 2022, I went to the head of the the Sims through a proxy and I said everything in the Sims should be an NFT, right? You should allow players to, you know, like because by the way, they're already doing it on the gray market, so let's just legitimize it and then you can get a tax on it because it's it's happening anyway. So why not bring it out into the light? You get a benefit, encourage it, lean into it. And I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but the answer came back. I can do exactly what I do every single day, not embrace anything web three, grow my business 7% and keep my job. We talk about fear of loss, right? Like they don't want to shift to that economic model. They don't want to take that chance. Even if there was massive upside for them, they're like, "Look, I work at EA. It's a very cushy gig, great perks, great benefits. I work with the smartest people and the biggest brands. There's a lot to like about it. You want me to stop all that or change all that and embrace this thing that is perceived as risky? No thanks." And not only that, but you know, I think there's going to be, you know, kind of wide disparaging of this as a movement because the

publishers view this as our margins are already too thin and we can't cut players in. Now, the backwards thinking of that is if players know that they can sell their stuff, your percentage of monetization is going to go up quite a bit, right? Because I I'll spend because I'm not trapped. And if your percentage of sales is going to go up, your percent of players monetize is going to go up, that means your LTV is going to go up. And in addition to that, because players know that they will can monetize and get out, then your cost per acquisition is going to go down. Your install costs are going to go down. So it hits them in the things that they feel the most pain like UA is the most expensive thing that all these publishers are going through now. If you look at the number of apps in the app store, if you look at this Bitass system, you look at kind of iOS 17 changes where you don't get IDFA benefits or IDFA now is prohibited. Like there's just all these things that have kind of blocked the kind of the good old days of mobile player acquisition or freeto play player acquisition. You know, web 3 was going to relieve a lot of that pressure, but nobody wanted to take the risk on it. And when they did, if you look at like Ubisoft, it was such

a terrible implementation that it just further kind of engendered, you know, ill will. And so I'm like, okay, that's not great. That doesn't help. Look, I still believe in web 3 very much. I still believe that players should own certain things. There should be a sharing like I didn't license this from you. I am not renting it. I paid for it with my money. Let me do with it as I see fit. You can control it. You can take a vig of the sale. Great. Give me the the free the free market choice. Do with it as I see fit. And yeah, look, if NFTts and fungeible tokens got a rebrand, like went to a public and said, "Hey, we need to, you know, we just came out of a scandal. You know, help dress us up and make us look better. We can call it something else." I think that'd be great. Yeah. Every once in a while you hear, you know, Rockstar is toying with the idea of, you know, NFTTS or fungeible tokens. If they did it and they showed that it worked, then everybody else would follow suit. But yeah, it's uh that's what pulled me into the space and I very much believed in it. Where it all fell apart though, if you're kind of want to ask about kind of what that journey is, it all fell apart when all these people who were website makers effectively got into game development. I use the term loosely

because there was there was it was gamefy websites and it was not great. There weren't games. They weren't enjoyable. Uh so people came in and said, people who were kind of crypto curious came in and said, "This is a joke. No thanks." There's a few kind of breakout hits, but none of them were breakouts because like, "Oh my god, this is so unbelievably fun to play." Um but I do know a lot of big kind of AAA studios kind of try to look into it and dabble and there there are some decent play experiences out there, but nothing. There was no Northstar, which is what really helped, you know, free to play. like there was you know there was you know you know there was Farmville there was social city that we did at at playm there was Marvel Avengers lions at play there's a lot of freetoplay games that we did that sort of said this is how freeto play works that was the paradigm and then everybody follow followed suit but do you think so I guess there's a few things around NFT so they've become kind of toxic right so they and I think even if you rebranded it people would would still know what it is and very uncomfortable with that notion and I

think to your earlier your point is like the use cases that we've had so far for web 3 and then NFTTS is that you said earlier is it is it a tech it's a tech looking for an audience like looking for a problem rather than like
uh what is it
yeah thinking about a problem that you're trying to solve
well the wrong way is start at the customer solution work well the customer the customer problem is I spent all this money on this game and I am trapped like that's real tension
but you can't take that you can't take sword that you bought or or that cosmetic or that costume that you bought to another game, right?
Yeah. Let's let's not confuse interoperability with, you know, being able to sell what you've already done. Like if you look at like eBay and what in
whatever it was, there was all these accounts being sold on eBay and the publisher went to eBay and said, "You can't do this. It's called RMT, like real money transaction or real money trans like it was something like that." And these players like, "Look, I've got all the skins in Fortnite or in League of Legends or what have you, and I'm tired of playing this game, and I just

want to sell my crown credentials." They were selling them on eBay, left, right, and center. And somebody famously spent something like, "God, I know I'm going to get the number wrong, so I apologies from other players. They don't want to spend time grinding for gold. They don't want to spend time trying to get things that didn't draw from them. They just want to play the core game. We know that's true. If you look at Ultima Online 30 some odd years ago, somebody bought a house on Ultima Online for $3,000 on eBay and and the industry lost their minds, right? You can tell me that this is a technology looking for a solution. I'm telling you this is something that players want to do because they have done it and they've done it at the risk of getting their account blacklisted, right? So I have
that that's like that's like a payto- win element that players might not want in
I think I don't I don't I don't think it's like it's not pay to win. Like if I were to sell my League of Legends account, I have like 300 skins on my

League of Legends account. I've been playing it for 17 years. I got 26,000 games of League of Legends under my belt.
That's not pay to win. That's just I have all this stuff unlocked because it's not a pay to win game, right? It's just not. And even World of Warcraft is a role playing game. Sure, there's PvP, but that's not what drives World of Warcraft or what did drive World of Warcraft. Clash of Clans is not really pay to win either because when you I'm sorry, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans because when they do their esports comps, they're loan caps, right? There there's this great equalizers that they put in when anytime you want to compete, they want to say, "We want to make sure that everybody's handicapped the same." And so, there's this whole notion of I've collected all this stuff. I've crafted it. It's dropped for me. I've bought it. I'm no longer interested in playing this and I would like to leave and I'd like to feel good about leaving but I can't sell my account. I can't sell the items in my account. So therefore I am stuck.
So to follow on a bit from that so I guess when we're looking at these trends and then we'll go into AI is kind of to close this out I guess.
However long that topic takes but uh
I guess how can you ever really tell if an exciting new trend or buzzword will take off or not? And then like when

you're exploring that is it incumbent if you're a big company to explore that how do you derisk that etc like cuz so web free oh I guess we have to explore is kind of exciting and now AI we have to explore that how do you do that
well I I think what you have to do is you have to look at each kind of movement or buzzword if you will or situation and apply it correctly like NFTTS and fungeible tokens and the blockchain and these cryptocurrencies that is a technology right that is that is a a product, utility, feature, use case, you know, kind of ecosystem. AI is a tool, right? It's very different. What does it allow you to do now that you have, you know, these models at your at your uh at your disposal? Like every single thing, you know, 2D is okay, now I'm going to revisualize kind of how does this world kind of come to life? Like what do these things afford you the opportunity to do? And AI is fascinating that what it affords you to do in terms of where it collapses and compresses certain things where it allows for better things to be built at a higher level but not by machines but by by

people and so I think you have to take each implementation or each execution say okay where's this going to impact the overall customer experience right so you know I kind of frame it with you know AI doesn't make and we can talk about kind of the components of AI and I have a lot of thoughts on kind of you know the history of tooling and and and been perceived. But I kind of like to say that AI doesn't make bad ideas good, but it makes good ideas testable much faster. And that's really the big difference, right? If I can take a good idea and test it sooner, that's really beneficial to me as a product creator, product operator, what have you. And so I guess with what you've seen from the people that you talk to and then maybe what you're doing yourselves at Tano, you know,
how do you actually how are you integrating AI into your workflow at the moment or are you just looking at it? Like what do you do? How do you kind of how do you do it?
We use it to compress and collapse, you know, schedules of things. I I give you one example, and it's going to be a

an oddly tangential example, but I think you'll see where I'm going with it. So when calculators first came out, people are like, "Oh my god, students will be terrible at math now. Calculator is going to make everything so easy." Math is still really hard and you still have to know how to use a calculator. But what a calculator did is it removed the need to always do long division by hand, right? So it's like, okay, I know how to do long division, but if I have to do it every single time, it's going to slow me down. So then that effect was we went from what when calculus come out in the 60s, early 70, we went from teaching calculus in college, now teaching calculus in high school. and not, you know, advanced placement students their senior year in high school. No, like, you know, sophomore, junior year. Now, you've advanced so quick mathematically through your kind of your grade school years, your middle school years, what have you, that you're now taking a higher level math sooner because you've compressed the need to remove the grunt work, right? And I look at AI the same way. you know, you have it used to be, you know, look, I have line art. I have pencil sketches. I'm going to storyboard. I'm going to ink and paint

it. I'm going to, you know, lay out. I'm going to wire it. I'm going to rig it. I'm going to I'm going to do all these things. Now, what we're saying is you still have to have that process. You still have to have that hygiene. But what AI allows you to do is allows you to compress that grunt work. And the real benefit I think where we've seen is we've always said we want our highest value employees to be working on the things that give us the most ROI on their time, right? And so if programmers don't have to do low-level scripting, if artists don't have to do these concept sketches, they can work on kind of, you know, final aesthetics, you know, uh coders can work on feature implementation, they don't have to worry about optimization or like I said, you know, writing scripts and whatnot. like that allows them to operate at the highest level more often and sooner. And so you think about that collapsing of that timeline. Like that to me is what's the most freeing thing. It's not like, oh, I don't need half the artist I had anymore or half the programs I have anymore, but I can do better things sooner with the exact same number of people at a higher level. Like I love the idea of that, right?

Do you think this is the real deal with is AI like actually a trend that you're finding useful right now? and you think without
question without question but I will tell you this a cautionary tale so there's a couple so I've been using AI for a little over a year and a half and I use it in a lot of different ways right uh I use it to do everything from you know strategic thinking on how do I kind of take on a category or how do I solve a problem to I use it to storyboard I use to vibe code gameplay prototypes I use it to uh I use it to write a I'm writing a novel with it but just just because I can because I'm trying to keep my tool set sharp. So, I've kind of used it across a bunch of different disciplines. I've even wrote I even wrote a really a really I think really fun chatbot. Um, and I'm not a coder necessarily. And so, that means the code was slow and non-performative and all this stuff, but it works. And so, I feel like I have a decent lens as a consumer and as somebody who builds products for a living. I will tell you that AI is great at certain things and terrible at other

things. I think the knee-jerk reaction is like, oh, it's Google with a voice. It's like, no, it's not. Like, you don't want a generative search engine. Like, that's an awful idea. And there's a whole bunch of reasons why. Um, they're like, "Oh, now it can just write a story." Like, it shouldn't because the story it writes are terrible. It can tell me if my idea is good or not. Like, no, it can't. It can just tell you if it looks like another idea, but it can't tell you how good your idea is. Like, so there's all these, I think, these really knee-jerk assumptions that people just make like, oh, we'll no longer need XYZ that are not correct, right? Like, it's not an arbiter of quality. It's it's actually coded to be agreeable with you. So when I say tell me if you think my idea is good because they don't want to hurt your feelings like your idea is great. It's like okay. Then I say I want you to give me a really harsh critique. Like is my idea bad? They're like your idea is not very good. It's like they're just matching my energy. They're giving me what they're being agreeable with me. Even when I say tell me if my idea is bad now you can say tell me if my idea is good or bad. And there's all these ways that you can get around like you you have it you say don't tell me something that you can't prove. Show me what your rubric is. Tell me your

evaluation. you get really good at understanding how to get around that obsequious kind of buttkissing mentality that they have. So you have to be very dialed in on what your prompting is, right? Like that's really really particular because just out of the box AI is actually more dangerous to the creative process than it is helpful. I really believe it. I had a guy I saw a guy he's like I put millions of my own dollars in this business idea that I every step of the way told me how great it was. And I launched it and nobody cared and I'm out all this money and f them and like right like don't fall for the lure of you're so good because they want you to think you're so good because they want to make you feel good about what you're doing. They don't want to tell it to you straight. So you got to be careful. You have it's a tool like I said you have to know how to use it. You have to hold its feet to the fire. I actually take three tools and have them fight with each other to get what I think is a good answer, right? Between Gemini 3 and Claude to Opus45 and CHBT51. I have them fight amongst themselves to get a good sense of what I think because they are a good sparring partner, but they're not a final decision maker.
So, one of my last questions, it's such

a big topic. we could talk about like the ethics of it as well, but I think the the the question I wanted to ask kind of based on this kind of thing that we're going through is if you're you're running a studio, you're running a big company now. Do you go all in like on this on this technology or do you kind of put it in incrementally? So by that there's a good talk by Mishka Katov the structural fund at Roioon recently who talked about this. So apps flyier they I believe they took effectively it's like a few months off. I'm sure they were still doing lots of work but effectively like a few months off to specifically train on AI tools and then from that they can now use it however they like the stuff however it helps them so they now have the knowledge whereas other companies sort of slowly feeding it into the production process. I appreciate there's other things with games. You know, two years into a game production, you probably don't want to change the pipeline, I guess, of tech,
right?
Yeah.
Stuff I probably don't know that much about there, but I imagine. So, if it's you, maybe the answer varies, but how

would you how do you approach it?
You know, the answer does vary. It all depends on what you have. Like I said, if you are a twoman shop and you don't have an artist and you don't have a certain skill set, like, you know, you can certainly code up and I've done it. I've coded up a social media marketing person that's an agentic AI, right? There's a whole scaffolding that you can build. You can create frameworks and you can figure out what it can do for you and provided you know you use AI also generate that content there. Now you have a social media person that can automatically kind of fire off things to the various platforms and help you build a strategy and all that fun stuff. That's great. That doesn't mean you hit a button and you're done. It goes from normally somebody would do be doing this for like just say that was my job. If I were to code up an agent to replace me, I don't remove myself from picture. Instead of doing, you know, 40 to 45 hours a week worth of work on this one kind of, you know, job responsibility, I'm now spending 15 to 18 hours a week. So, like I said, it collapses what I have to do, but it doesn't remove me

from the equation. And so to your question of how does a company do that? I think the thing that I would I would say is well where are you blocked? Where do you think you're inefficient? And then interrogate those in a smart way. I would not go all in unless you don't have any choice. Like like I said, if you're a two-man shop, you don't have a social media person, but yet you want to build community, great. I would investigate that, you know, straight away because if you spend all your time doing social media, what are you not doing, right? What's the opportunity cost for a small shop? Right? Um, if you're a really big group and you've got your framework and your, you know, your your pipelines, but yet you feel like they're broken, like interrogate solutions here in non-impactful ways to see what you learn. Uh, I don't know that a lot of companies have the luxury of let's just take two months off and learn AI. And the other thing you learn, there's there's a saying, I don't know if you know called the red queen race, right? From like you're running as fast you can just to stay in the same position. That's what AI, that's what AI is because of, you know, you look at Gemini 3 just came out and now um GPT51 is going to come out with something called Oh, it has the dumbest name. It's

called Garlic. I want to say they issued a code red and now the you know chat GPT garlic is on its way out to compete with Gemini. Every model is trying to one up each other so fast and there's so much drinking from the fire hose. It's not like, "Oh, good. AI is done. Now we can learn it. It's steady state." Like, no. There's so many really smart, really clever models. And within the model, there's models, right? So, there's GTP 5150 used to be 03 mini. Like, there's just there's just so much stuff. You can't just say, "Now I know AI. Now, I can go back to my day job." Like, it's it's a constant constant learning. And a lot of the ways for me, the only way I learn is by using them and seeing what the output is.
Right. Uh, that was all my questions. So, thank you so much for that and kind of guiding us through various trends, but hopefully people got some insights there about how you actually navigate the trends and decide which which ones are the real thing and maybe which ones aren't. So, I really appreciate your time.
Yeah, of course. Like I said, I I I love talking about the gaming industry. If I can help anybody, great. I certainly

believe uh what I believe very strongly, but I'm also I have a saying that I I have strong positions, but weakly hell, right? Like I can let go of them if I know that I'm wrong. mindset that comes from uh 30 years in this business of not being right all the time. No, you're if you've achieved ego death and you're in the games business, good for you. You're in a good position.
All right. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for tuning in and listening. Uh we'll be back soon as ever with more interviews and the week mobile games. So have a good day. We'll speak to you soon.
Thank you.