The Metacast by Naavik: Roundtable #36 - New Game Ideas, Costs of Buggy Launches, & YouTube’s NFTs

[Music] there's a lot of i would say fragmentation in terms of people's views of enemies some people think it's literally going to destroy the world some people think it's literally the fourth third second fifth coming of jesus depending on like where in the spectrum you are [Music] hi everyone welcome to navex the metacast roundtable 36 and today there was sun in the morning which is quite nice so i hope you're having a sunny day as well and today i'm joined by sebastian park and matt dion and we're going to be talking about some exciting topics the first one is going to be how to pronounce new sorry pronouns i prioritized new game ideas the costs of

buggy game releases and talking a little bit about youtube's creator nfts um my name is maria gillis and we'll start with some quick introductions uh matt if you want to go first sure hi maria thanks for having me on um my name is matt dion i'm a product manager by trade uh currently working at ea on the mobile side i've also worked at jam city and pocket gems in the past um and i've been contributing for novick as a writer for the most part for about a year now um doing various kind of deep dives and shorter pieces for the newsletter and i'm sebastian park i'm at sep park on twitter i am a venture partner at bitcraft the gaming esports ostensibly web 3 fund and also co-founder for infinite canvas which is a publisher for user generated games on platforms like roblox fortnite creative minecraft gta 5 online thanks for joining

oh exciting news so um navic has a youtube page now so you can find these podcasts on video by going to youtube and you can see our faces while we're talking yes we're all smiling now right that's it's for some people that's a feature it might be a bug in this regard so yeah we'll just uh kick off with the first topic today which is how to prioritize uh new game ideas and before i join the gaming industry i've always played games i i used to think how hard can it be to make a good game it must be so easy and yet um something else was was in store for for my career and i'm sure for um your careers as well so the the reason we're talking about this topic today is to maybe help someone someone who's out there trying to figure out what's the next game that they should be dedicating their time to to pursue and yeah let us know at the when you when you listen to the episode let us know if this has helped in any way it's always really nice to hear to hear your feedback

so yeah i always like to start with hypotheticals okay so imagine you've joined this company it's full of money and someone tells you you have this team and now you can go and build a game how matt how how would you start this process um i'd first want to sort of survey the landscape a little bit like is this a brand new company that has never made a game before or um have they made other titles in the past because it's much easier to make a similar game to previous games that you've iterated on or prototyped on than it is to start from scratch building all your tools all your internal tech and developing expertise because there's a whole part of it that has to do with looking at the competition understanding how their mechanics work and how you're going to do a different twist on it um so first thing i would do is understand what are what are our sort of core competencies as game developers first if there are none um maybe you would

start by looking at the business opportunity uh what does the competitive landscape look like what are the other titles in some genres that you're interested in is it you know really a red ocean and there's a lot of competition you're gonna have a hard time pulling players away from the incumbents to join your game or it's a sort of relatively unexplored design space which may be more attractive from a business perspective but may also be riskier because it's an unproven market so those are some of the things that i would look at first and you know lastly and perhaps most importantly is like what is most interesting to you what do you want to work on i think the games industry is it's a passion business and if you're working on a game that you're not really inspired and motivated by you know you might not be bringing your best self to work every day so i think that's an important consideration too that's really interesting because when i was when i was studying to to enter into the industry a lot of the

articles and podcasts just resources that i was interacting with the they kept saying don't design a game for yourself design a game for for an audience how how do you balance you want to be working on something that you're really passionate about however you're designing with an audience in mind um i think it's just being able to be objective and kind of take a step back and set aside your own biases um i'm trying to think of an example like i love really deep story driven rpgs um and complex systems and really deep combat systems and things like that but if i'm designing for maybe a mobile audience on shorter sessions i might move away from something like that where narrative let's say is not as proven out in the mobile space i would say like generally speaking of

course fewer people are interested in like deep stories on a mobile game as they are competitive pvp combat for example so just being able to take a step back and be conscious of your own kind of biases and things that you prefer as a player is really important and you know one of the ways to do that is just play a lot of games and understand what's out there do you think it's important for a company to know what kind of games they want to make from from the start for example if a company says we love merge games we want to dedicate our time to doing merge i think it's it's helpful but i don't i don't think it's required i mean part of it um sebastian can probably speak because it has to do with like how much runway do you have and how much time do you have to figure it out um a great example uh from the bitcraft side of things there's a studio called frost giant right and their specialty is real-time strategy games and the people who founded that company are real-time strategy experts

who came from blizzard and worked on starcraft and warcraft and so they have a clear expertise in a specific space a specific genre and they knew from the outset that that's what they're going to go work on that makes a lot of sense to me but if you're bringing in founders with a variety of backgrounds from a variety of different genres or mobile versus pc versus console you may need to do a little bit of soul searching first to figure out what is it that we're all aligned on that we can kind of hit the ground running yeah sebastian you have any thoughts yeah i mean i think the question itself is an interesting one in part because the it's worth taking a step back and thinking through what it means to create a game and what it means to approach this problem there are some easy pitfalls to avoid right so the first one is actually make something i think that's something that we see a lot especially in a lot of creative ecosystems not just gaming but also

music movies etc there's a huge barrier that's going from zero to one so going from not having made something to have made something you don't want perfect to be enemy of good either and so one of the things that certainly we look for both at big craft on the gaming side but also myself personally we want to see people who've made games and we want to see games and i don't have a built-in opinion you know some of my colleagues may disagree with this but i don't have a built-in opinion as a type of game each game has its pluses and minuses and at the end of the day games break down to a combination of user acquisition retention and monetization and where you want your game to live is really a function of how you've built the game i come from i think similar to mac came from a background of mobile gaming and so because of the era i became a game developer during i'm very metrics driven right so i you know very much was on the like first wave of mobile games right your thoughts of the world right

that's a very different ecosystem than your story driven aaa cyberpunk games and i have a lot of respect for those people similar to how i love playing starcraft and i have a lot of respect for the frost giant guys what i will say though and this is certainly true is there seems to be a huge difference between someone who spends 10 years on a project and never ships anything versus someone who spends 10 days on a project and ship something and i think generally speaking you want to be in the latter category in the former category because to matt's point you just don't know and no one knows right the game type the game archetype how what the game you is successful or not successful is really out of your control if you can admit that you're on a really good initial step if if it is out of out of your control i think that's what i find quite difficult in this topic because it just feels like there are so many factors out of your control and let's say in this in this hypothesis that your studio that already has one hit game we can then talk about if it's your your first game um if you

already have a hit game you're trying to find out what's next and maybe you have a vision of the kind of games you want to make and you have a list of ideas how how would you select from from those ideas which one to to go with first yeah i mean game uh we have to also have the a prior constraint that making games is impossible right i think that's something that we should accept coming into this ecosystem which is that game design game production game creation is almost an impossible task if you just think about the sheer number of people involved and the things that go right for you to make it happen it's just really unlikely which is why it's such a passion-driven industry it's an industry full of people who understand hopefully some people don't but like hopefully understand that this is an impossible dream and we're going after this dream because we're so passionate about gaming and i think that's awesome what i will say to people is that you should if you have the expectation it should change how you approach these problems some of the best game studios in the

world the joke for riot for 10 years was that they were right game as opposed to riot games right here here's a group of people who made an amazing game in league of legends and it still took them 10 years to make anything else that resembled valuable for them the folks at jagex who created runescape you know they've been trying to make a new game for a decade plus right that was the thesis in which they raised money back 10 years ago they've done really well runescape there hasn't been another ip or game they've made that's performed even closely as well as they have so if you're a studio and you're embarking on the next game if you are you know super giant games or you're one of these double fine games really what you're doing is you can go about in two ways you can just cross your fingers you can hope you can iterate on a single game title and get to the point where you're happy with it and trust in your taste or you can do what you know places like ea do or or or supercell does which is

you go in you do all of them and you hope you track you track if any of them work out and if they start working out you really really push harder into there i i can't emphasize enough one of the things that i see as a fallacy among new game developers out there is this idea that it just works and that's just not the case if you look at gentian impact which i think is a game that people talk about a lot nowadays that was iteration number four for them the first three games did not do nearly as well as the fourth one and they've they're learning and improving but there's still an element of rng there's still an element of luck and so if you're a studio embarking on your next game like have a lot of money have a lot of time and then spend a lot of time iterating and killing things as you as you go to the next idea yeah i would totally agree with that there's so much of context and circumstance that is beyond your control

as a game developer you could have the best idea in the world with a leading ip and you might just be too late or too early like look at the graveyard of clash royale competitors that came out with different ips that tried to do the same formula and just they they were just too late um or they didn't execute as well as supercell so yeah i mean uh i 100 agree with everything sebastian was saying now and and in many ways it comes down to shots on goal and being able to move quickly and that's where some of these like hyper casual developers really have a superpower to just like pump out prototypes week after week and just see what hits and then i think from there maybe this is taking in a different direction there there are ways you can get early signal on your ideas without having to necessarily go and invest millions and millions of dollars into building the technology there are ways you can kind of get early signals whether it's user testing or testing your creatives um things like that so yeah and and i will say just

from a pure storytelling perspective i think it's important to say that we all have survivorship bias that we hear a lot of stories from people who've made it and so you want i love legion td i think it's one of the best games of 2021 it was made by a couple developers and their partners over seven years grinding away to make a really truly exceptional game that for every story here about that i also know dozens of game developers who are amazing who worked on projects like the sims and civilization who were also in a hole in san francisco for 10 years making games and they didn't do well and they're happy to have done it because it was just what they wanted to do and now they're back you know working at other game studios and saving up money for the next shot on goal i think it's fine i just want to make sure that we dispel this myth that hey if you had done the work to select the right game type or seeing the right audience or seeing the future somehow

you would have been successful and the answer is no it's more likely that you take shots on goal and if you're really passionate and you want to keep doing it you hope for the best and and some people are damian chazelle and release whiplash and la la land and some people are like the guy who wrote the king's speech and took him 50 years to have a hit can i ask a follow-up question there sebastian like when you're looking at pitches from uh aspiring you know game developers and they're kind of over indexing on one game idea um how do you receive that like presumably you want them to have a plan for what if that fails you know it depends on the group right so if it's if it's people like frost giant or they're like yo we're just gonna make this work you you bound the team a lot of the ventures betting on groups of people doing smart things and hoping to integrate if it's if it's someone who's trying to do a triple a idea without having done a triple a idea before or trying to really fix it on a specific game type that's

personally a path for me i have friends and colleagues who are much better at diving deep with game creators to figure it out i'm far more metrics driven just as from my training and so a lot of what i do is i actually don't even ask questions about the game genre and instead i focus on hey like how are you thinking about arriving to the conclusion it's it's your point it's less about what you come to conclusion of whether you like or someone else likes it it's more of a conclusion of like how did you get to that process because at least in my world view if you if you're faced with data that says you're wrong you should probably update your priors and so that is something that i certainly look at a lot there that said there are people at bitcraft and other game investors i know who are very thesis driven where they're very much looking for a 4x game where they're very much looking for a hyper casual game or very much looking for fps game those people are just monsters in their own right in terms of their intellectual horsepower and i just don't think i'm on that scale where i feel that strongly by any game

type i spent a lot of this past week playing vampire survivors and it was a great game and it's like not not exactly cyberpunk 2077. yeah on the shots on go um i'm biased towards mobile because i i work in i work in mobile so i know that you can do prototypes really quickly but i also worked on uh i worked in a company that was not mobile it was pc and it was a lot harder to get to that first bill that you can put live and do that that fast iteration how how do you think those differences exist within companies and do you have any recommendations if someone is working on a pc or console game how they can get to those metrics quickly yeah i actually am a huge believer i mean this is self-serving so apologies but i'm a huge believer in that you should iterate on other prof uh other platforms and then bring it on to unreal or unity afterwards so a good example this is the best game i played in the last five years is probably dota

autochess and dota autochess initially was built inside of dota 2 because it's just easier for them to use the existing engine in order to build it out i've actually seen some of the coolest game projects and the ones i can't talk about as much were were people building on top of the starcraft 2 map editor which i never thought i'd see again and it was awesome i'm like super excited about these guys and these gals who are doing some really cool stuff there and so you're completely right i remember the i remember opengl for those of you who are older and i got to be honest with you such a pain in the butt trying to remember your multivariable calculus when you're trying to just create something moving across and just walking whereas i think we're fortunate that in this era to unity engine the unreal engines are a lot simpler and so just don't worry about those bits i'm a huge game loops believer personally and so what i would argue for people is hey at least when you're prototyping don't worry about graphical fidelity don't worry about a

super accurate physics engine focus on a thing that you think will keep people engaged and make it fun now for some people that will look a lot like candy crush and for some people that look like a bullet hell and for some people that looks like this like story-driven dating sim who knows right and i think it's just a function of whatever the game loop is you should iterate on the game loop as opposed to necessarily trying to put the cart before the horse if we still use those analogies i think we do at least i do i hope i'm not in the past i feel like a boomer all the time so i don't know to tell you yeah i i understand the feeling and in terms of the the audience i thought you made a really a really interesting point that it's it's better to do shots on go and not try to get to perfection before deciding what idea to follow by doing deep research into the audience and trying to understand considering the

audience what kind of stuff they like and i think um like i said at the beginning when i was trying to get into the industry and going through all of these resources that's sort of the opposite that what they were saying they were saying find the audience um understand what games they play understand what motivates them what will keep them around but i don't i never quite understood like in practice how are people supposed to do that and matt do you have any thoughts i think that that approach that attitude is still pretty pervasive um probably at some of the larger companies especially um i think this this idea of shots on goal is maybe a little bit more recent certainly with like mobile free to play um you know maybe seb can tell me otherwise but that's that's kind of my take on it um and you know it it was somewhat successful for some of these incumbents and i think there are ways to go about it um

presumably if you work at one of these companies they have a lot of data on their players and the the fans of a given ip and what other games they like to play what genres they resonate most closely with and where some of the opportunities are there you know for example a trend in the last let's say five-ish years or so has been to kind of combine uh genres or combine a core mechanic with a metagame mechanic and see what comes out and so you know presumably you're going to have some market research on which of those might be the the most appealing combinations we see that our players are playing i don't know home renovation games or we're a match three company well let's like do a home renovation plus a match three so this is a really simplistic example but uh you get the ideas you know some of these companies they've been doing this approach for a long time and they have a lot of data and a lot of [Music] organization and manpower behind this

approach to support it and make it keep working even if it's perhaps not as successful from a philosophical perspective as sebastian or myself might might think it is yeah and i just not to put words in matt's mouth and but fortunately he's here so you can tell me i'm wrong i i'd imagine this is also just us over indexing and over rotating as well the the approach you're describing is a fine approach for some percentage of the population uh be it at bigger companies or if you're just particularly good at that i think there's this misnomer that we have what i call the crater myth and like the idea that we have to have a hero in some kind of mold and they have these like shared experiences and therefore they're the same and they have this outcome and i just want to straight up reject that premise there are people who are going to do some really cool stuff i met this lovely couple of co-founders who are working on a new game studio that have a completely different approach their core concept is

that they have this underserved market and this underserved segment and their entire mental model about developing games is specifically to that segment that's really cool i'm hugely supportive of them and then like bitcoin put a check into them to lead their round and we're really excited for them as people i think i think both of them are going to be awesome but that's not the same stuff that other people have done it's just it depends on the person i think if we can just get away from generic do this advice instead say here are a bunch of ways to approach it i think that is probably a a decent outcome yeah and by the way not all developers have the same um level of ambition in terms of scale right you might be going after a specific type of gamer specific market that is decidedly not mass market and then you have you know ea take two activision and so on the big companies that are you know deciding to go after massive

markets that are at large scale and these are there's nothing wrong with either approach they're just different approaches you're going to take different actions you're going to staff your game differently you're going to build with a different ambition in mind knowing that from the outset do you think this is different for web3 games you think this shots on goal um metrics driven is is also how new games could be prioritized in web 3 yes yeah like yes i i it is what i'll say and i think this is probably the story that elucidates this best when mobile first started for those of you too young to remember the mobile is your phone and so there were games prior to that when mobile first started the top five games in 2011 were games like sword and sorcery which were four to ten dollar single player experiences that worked on your phone and destroyed your battery life that was what mobile gaming looked like 10 years

ago today the top five is all share that they're free to play they all have built-in social mechanics they all have built-in in-app purchases and they're all incredibly networked and so their synchronous network is probably the biggest commonality across all of these top five mobile games matt's project that he's working on is almost certainly all these things i just described right and so that's just a difference in how the format of creations evolved right now what we see in vr gaming just use another emerging market it's going to be very different when we see 10 years from now because as creators and as creatives you first start with what you know and for a lot of these people what they know is cyberpunk 2077 there's an entire cohort of developers who have mobile backgrounds who are coming to web3 they're what they're going to build is very going look much more like 3s and 2048 than dots and then there's going to be this other cohort of people who are have mats background who will probably

bring synchronous multiplayer to web 3 at some point i just think it's just a platform issue and so is one way right or the other i mean i think so but that's just my personal opinion right and so i i would say all these things probably even work just like they will probably work for vr like there's going to be low fidelity vr at some point vr tetris here's a ton of fun and let me tell you you just really can't improve the graphical fidelity of four cubes right so one thing that i think is really interesting as it relates to web 3 and and trying out new game ideas is the speed at which some of these developers can iterate um if you're coding something on the blockchain it's there for anyone to see your smart contracts right and this happened with like wolf game they released wolf game and then there was a bunch of sort of copycats that came right afterwards and i think that that's a pattern that we'll continue to see play out someone will come up with a mechanic or a system

that really resonates with players and then you're gonna see a bunch of follow-on developers forking that code and doing their own little twist on it um i thought for sure maybe this has happened i don't know but i thought for sure when the chain faces arena happened i don't know if you guys are familiar with that but when that um when that sort of project kicked off that there would be a bunch of followers that immediately added like let me buy back in for x amount of eth or let me um you know some different mechanics where i can pull out my my i guess i should take a step back and explain what chain faces is for the listeners who may not be aware basically uh to really uh shorten this summary you bought an nft of a warrior it's a a chain face which is based off of a previous project called chain faces you can look it up and you had a set amount of time within which to decide i want to submit this warrior to the arena

or not and then if you miss that timer it's over like you missed your shot and then when you submit it to the arena it's locked in you cannot take it out between rounds you have to wait for a certain period of time and every round some percentage of the nfts were eliminated and gone forever and the remainder stayed on to the next round and every round the bounty went up so kind of similar to like a squid games format and if you pulled out you get your tiny sliver of the bounty and or otherwise you could just stay in full degen and hope to win the kind of lottery ticket prize at the end of it so that's that was chain faces in a nutshell i thought it was fascinating and i'm surprised that more developers didn't just like take that idea and fork it and do their own thing okay and um that's that's really interesting i'm trying to picture this game because i've never played it um i was part of the listeners that doesn't know it um yeah that sounds that sounds really interesting i'm curious and uh sorry

just last question i think before we move on to the next topic i was really curious sebastian if a company goes to speak to you and they have this record of failed prototype ideas would you judge them differently maybe in a more positive manner in a more negative manner like what would you do in that circumstance you know i'd probably judge them in a positive manner just from a personal standpoint i certainly think that if you can if you have a failed track record but at least you have some track record that's better than no track record i i don't think it's really a huge deal one way or the other i think certainly it's just a function of working through things people i mean i like to say i'm just to to quote a very like truism like zingo was like mark pincus is like seventh id or eighth idea or something like that this chord was a game studio before it became what it is today photo bucket was a game studio before it became what it was there are a lot of things that just takes reiteration and he's got bet on people that's just my personal belief

though well i think we'll we'll jump on to the the next topic about the costs of uh buggy game launches and you've been mentioning uh cyberpunk 2077 a lot sebastian which is a really nice tiger because it is it is related to that yeah i um the original the original idea for for this topic is from an opinion article in games industry.bins that was based on the recent patch for cyberpunk 2077 that now brought the game up to maybe what people would expect an aaa game quality standard to be at when they first start start to play it and the the writer um called rob fahey was exploring the thought that the we'll fix it post launch strategy is starting to have costs and risks that outweigh

um delaying the release so i was interested maybe sebastian in first understanding your your opinion in terms of the pros and cons of releasing an incomplete or or buggy game versus delaying this launch yeah i mean it's it's interesting because for anyone who's gone through qa cycles the honest answers you're never done like they're like i've never played or released or worked on a game that was bug free explicitly the case and so what's weird here and can i read the article i think it's an interesting piece where do you have that cut off like that's i think like what matt needs to decide for his games and it's one of those hard really truly hard problems of being a producer and product manager is here's your deadline here is the game it will never be done it will never be done and especially the way games are made nowadays where they're you know live ops and continuously developed it will never be done like truly like design never to be done and so historically when you have what we call

like a final master uh ecosystem this is predates a lot of people you just had to ship it and have it mastered onto a dvd or a cd or cartridge and there was no internet to patch the game in post and so you spent a lot of time qa and a lot of time queueing a lot of time qa until the deadline and then once it was out in the wild you were done i think people are beginning to think that hey because of these games and the styles people are taking shortcuts it's unclear to me if that's the case i'd imagine there's just a deadline and they're probably just queuing like mad up until the deadline and they click launch and then once it's launched they're like okay now we have another two week sprint to qa some more and go from there i have yet if i can one day ship a bug free game i will probably retire that day because that'd be awesome like i think if i were to launch a wordle competitor it would still be have a bug something some random form factor where it doesn't render properly on the iphone 3g or something like that so

yeah matt how do you in your experience draw the line as to where you'd be happy to to release a game it is going to have bugs how do you how do you decide how many bugs are too many bugs uh this is where i would put on my product manager hat and try and cost out potential impacts uh for any bugs that we've maybe identified um you know this happens a lot in mobile games like you're putting out an update maybe once a month and you know you've got a couple of features in here you've had some time to qa it maybe it came in hot we don't know like the full impact maybe we know that there's a bug but we don't have time to fix it properly and so it's a kind of cost benefit analysis of like well this only affects this specific device and then as a pm i go back and look at the data and say okay this percentage of our players are playing on this device and let's say they have a 75 chance of you

know encountering this bug what percentage of these device owners are also spenders or are really like late game players you could do a whole cost benefit analysis uh and say like this is the dollar impact that we expect to see from releasing with this particular bug now in these examples like a cyberpunk there's a lot of bugs and there's just a massive scale of the game and it's very difficult to do that same exercise for every single bug that you may or may not encounter and the complexity is going up all the time right not only are games increasing in scale infidelity but they're releasing on more platforms and more devices and so the effort required to you know qa and catch all these bugs is it's just monumental and so you know it's a sebastian's point i don't know that it's possible to catch them all eventually the business owner or product owner has to make a call as to like we've invested

this much money into the development and especially if this is a live service game we're going to continue to invest in development at what point do we just say we have to get this out into the wild and start to return some of our investment so that we can keep funding the ongoing service it's a difficult call it's a difficult call i think that's why you see a lot of games stay in beta forever nowadays where they're like just like hey we're it's technically not released it's still in beta just please don't hurt us for the bugs released do you think we'll start seeing this impact player behavior in terms of uh pre-orders and buying games on day one day two day three release until that first patch comes out i i don't know is the honest answer i can tell you that when i played cyberpunk 2077 uh it wasn't that buggy for me but i also have a 3080 so like it's you know i'm i'm at the top end of the spend scale when it comes to computer hardware like i have g-sync i have a 3080 i have the most recent like

intel processor and so it's really easy for me to say this experience works well on my computer and so therefore i can just do get the game when i want to get it i just think it is such a hard thing to unpack and i don't mean this to say that the journalist is wrong i do think that economics are changing in this ecosystem and i think the writer did a good job articulating that i just don't know if there's a solution and so i just don't know is the answer it's difficult um i i think that there is you know increasing backlash for sure against releasing unfinished or buggy products however i think we also know that marketing is really effective at building that hype cycle for some of these games and no matter how many times consumers get burned there's always going to be a shiny new game on the horizon that everyone's excited about and they're gonna get really hyped about and they're gonna put in their pre-orders and then all of a sudden uh well it wasn't what we hoped it would

be um some of these games like let me just ask a theoretical question could cyberpunk have ever lived up to the hype that it had behind it when it was coming out like i understand the reality and i also played i played it on ps4 it was buggy but i still enjoyed it i still thought it was a really fun beautiful game with its problems to be sure but could it have ever lived up to the hype that was propelling it uh towards its early release i don't know yeah maria i think i think one really interesting example just to point out would be the the super giant games guys right specifically around hades they basically started early access like years before launch right and they just kept iterating and iterating and iterating on it and i gotta be honest with you i didn't even realize when the game officially launched i didn't have i had no idea it had been launched yet right like it won best game in 2021 and

i was like wait i swear i played that's game in 2018. right and so and so it's one of those or 2019 rather it's one of those things where it is so hard because the ecosystem is changing and i think the biggest thing to recognize is it is changing and how do we deal with that even if you're a switch game now there are so many day zero patches uh another fun example would be uh the new mario it's not that new anymore but the switch launched mario game moddy odyssey that game had some really hilarious game breaking bugs at launch when they had already mastered the cd and mastered the cartridge for everyone they had a day zero patch where if you bought the physical version of the game and this is this came up in the speedrun community apparently where if you own the physical copy of the game you could do all these crazy glitches that just aren't exact did not exist in the digital release of the game and that just shows you how much r d

went between the finalized version and the qa that happened on the digital release and so was cyberpunk to matt's point a little bit too hyped to the point where just no way this is going to be successful it was delayed for i think two presidencies in terms of release timelines so you know there would it's probably the case i was a little bit too hyped will that change how people go about their ecosystem i i don't know i i think certainly just gotta launch things at some point and i'm a huge believer in just launching and iterating anyway i think the pr hits a little bit overblown i think that it is changing there are ways to approach it that are different um to your point earlier about like supergiant and hades this is something we still see with games as a service a great example is lost ark that just came out just wrote about it in the newsletter last week that game first released in 2018 uh in korea and it's it's only now coming to our collective

consciousness in the west but it's gone through a lot of iterations and soft launches and a lot of polish in the years prior so it can be done another point i wanted to make before we move on is these really high profile um you know half-baked releases or buggy releases they're they're all on console and pc right um and i think there's something to that like there are a lot of examples on mobile of games that release and they're kind of quiet uh but they build over time in live service free fire is a great example of this like it you know it was one of the earliest battle royales on mobile but it didn't really pick up momentum for a couple of years and now it's just a juggernaut um and and so i think maybe this is related to the way that user acquisition works on mobile versus pc and console where of course the first cohort is really important but you can continue to improve over time and attract new users or acquire new users that will drive

further growth whereas with a game like cyberpunk you kind of launch it and you hope that it takes off but it's very difficult to recapture that momentum three six twelve months down the road after you've finally made these patches it's it's much more difficult to climb that mountain again yeah you took my question matt i was going to ask about lost ark i think um i it changed my behavior that's i i felt some empathy with what the writer was was expressing um the game that changed it for me was anthem i bought it on day one and then i i couldn't i couldn't play it and since then i i just stopped buying i wait a year now that's how conservative i've got and oh sorry matt i was just gonna say like i have so many games waiting to be played and the market is so saturated with great games that you can spend your

time on like i don't know that you can really afford to be putting out these games that aren't ready because players will just move on or they'll at your point maria they'll wait for it to go on sale or something and pick it up really cheap and then you know the cost benefit trade-off is even worse and sebastian when when you're looking at investing in in a company does the track record of their release the quality of their released games matter candidly we look way too early in the funnel to really have a good view there so does it help that you made starcraft yes does it help if you've made a super eva metacorp's vainglory yes but certainly the ecosystems changed right the environment in which starcraft was released they did a patch maybe a year maybe once a year maybe twice a year they had expansions right that's just a different environment and ecosystem that we live in today and so one thing i

always warn my friends and colleagues about is don't over index on the past because if you over index on the past you end up having some really bad mechanisms here and so we all find this just like underlying value of team and then hope for the best there yep makes makes a lot of sense i think it's definitely something to keep in mind and that's that's been an overall theme in today's podcast not over indexing in in the past and just keep on moving forward risk it and don't over analyze i think it's a summary of what we've been saying so far and i think then we'll just move on to the last topic today which is uh youtube's announcement for content creator nfts so this was in a blog post of youtube's chief product officer neil mohan where i'm just going to quote we believe new technologies like blockchain and nfts can allow creators to build deeper relationships with their fans for example giving a verifiable way for

fans to own unique videos photos art and even experiences from their favorite creators i didn't quite know what to think of this it just felt quite abstract i'm not really present in the web3 space and and nfts um sebastian do you have it do you have thoughts of what in practice this could look like yeah i mean my big my big push is just let's wait and see let's see what happens i certainly think that there's a lot of uh there's a lot of i would say fragmentation in terms of people's views of nfts right now some people think it's literally going to destroy the world some people think it's literally the fourth third second fifth coming of jesus depending on like where in the religious spectrum you are and and it's everything in between i i would say specifically here what i've known youtube to do and i've known what these folks to do is focus on improving creator monetization i think back to something we said at the top of the show often times a lot most systems break

down to user acquisition retention monetization and so the question for them is do they want nfts to be which of those three things i think that's going to be the biggest delineator of what this implementation looks like because if their focus is on youtube nfts being a monetization mechanism it's going to look very different than if it's a user acquisition or retention mechanism and i think that's something that we haven't fully grabbed yet and for what it's worth it's not a youtube song no one's really figured it out yet i am really interested because youtube is one of the few platforms i've seen where they have such a large inbuilt audience that there might be something there that you may want to own the video of freddie wong blowing up a building and so we'll see if there are some implementations there as well i was i was thinking about this from uh a games perspective because a lot of uh you know marketing now for games relies on content creators and then producing content for for your games and i was thinking i know that supercell has

creator codes where you can boost the creator and then each percentage of a purchase that you make i think it goes it goes to to that creator and i was wondering you know are we going to see in this a web 3 world where the creators for your game they have their own nfts and you can buy them directly and then you can go to a store in game to use those those tokens to buy something exclusive i don't know like how how do you do you have any thoughts on how this could apply to games i i will say like frankly youtube as a game ecosystem is far more based for user acquisition and then it is for anything else and certainly you could have that you know epic has i think a really cool creator code ecosystem where you can like type in your credit card and get some value out of it what i will say is that i just don't know if that's their focus and that that i think is the the thing that like continues to jump out at me as if that's

their focus completely agree with you i think you can just implement it and i think it'll be fine right but if if they're focused on different kpis like how are they going to view this world a good example of this is on the twitch side if you care more about viewable minutes than you do about unique users there are ways to uh augment your incentives around unique users versus viewable minutes as it turns out aggregating a bunch of people who have one person watching they play if you have one fan and you pay 10 hours a day you have exactly the same amount of output as someone who has 10 fans and plays one hour a day right and so there are ways to like work through that ecosystem in that way my concern is that they like my my hope is that they know but they may not know either right i think that's one of the fun things about this new world is that a lot of these implementations are people just like crossing their fingers and hoping for the best matt do you have any thoughts

um i think it's i think it's very interesting and i i'm not sure it's it's um i'm not sure that youtube is taking this strictly from a gamer perspective right like i think they probably look at this as a maybe even an existential threat if they're thinking about it really you know down the road but it's it's uh the nft uh economy is is such a game changer for the creator economy and youtube being such an integral part of that i think that they're thinking about it like how do we keep creators on our platform and how can we make it easy for them to tap into this new world of nft so it maybe it's something like allowing them the tools to just really quickly mint an nft or a token that will that they can sell to their fans that they can use to gate channels or videos behind maybe as a form of patronage for some of these creators like right now it's an ads driven business

and that works very well for youtube but there are probably some creators out there that would prefer not to serve ads to their fans and instead offer them an nft or a creator token of some kind that would allow them to support their work but not have to pump their feed full of ads so that's that's my first reaction is that youtube is coming at this from a creator economy standpoint and games is just one small part of that overall creator economy do you have any other thoughts on youtube's nfts all right well seems like we have a little bit of time left so i did prepare a quick question if we had some some minutes so matt what is the latest wow moment you had with a game something that made you go ah this is unexpected

interesting um [Music] lost ark has been a wow moment for me i have to say uh you know i as i mentioned i was writing the piece for master the meta last week and that kind of took me down the rabbit hole to learn more about this game i am not historically a big mmos guy but i have really enjoyed lost ark because of the way that it well one it's just super polished and two the way that it brings a lot of free to play best practices into the space um and it kind of scratches that diabolo itch for me a little bit like the isometric camera and just destroying hop uh hordes of monsters um it but it adds these little kind of like quality of life features from free to play that you see in like a like a lineage or um um what's the other one a black desert like the mobile um rpgs mmorpgs um so that for me has been the the biggest like

revelation i spent a lot of this last weekend playing lost ark and leveling up and i'm really enjoying it right now i do wonder if this is going to become best practice in the industry um we already do this a little bit in mobile games where you restrict your your soft launch to some countries before bringing it globally and i wonder if this successful example of lost art because that's something i've been hearing i haven't played it myself that's something i've been hearing from reviews and people have played is just praising the level of polish and feature completeness of the game so i do wonder if we'll just see other companies when they're building these big world type games of of taking a similar strategy i wouldn't be surprised i mean like scaling up in these as you said it's it's common practice in mobile now and it lets you prove out your bigger systems that may be a little bit riskier catch bugs as we were talking about earlier there's a lot of good to be

gained from just putting your game in the hands of players and seeing how it works and if your goal is ultimately to do this big event and unveiling it in the west quote unquote whatever that means like tier one countries let's say um you know they they've had a lot of experience leading up to this point and then they have a partner like amazon that has the scale and capacity to help them reach their kind of lofty goals um and you could just quickly compare this to what happened with new world which was another amazon mmo that was successful at launch but then encountered all these economy issues right which in theory if they had taken a similar approach to lost ark and released it in a few different territories prior to just massive worldwide launch in theory that would have been caught right like they would have figured that out ahead of time um maybe not maybe i'm oversimplifying but it's an interesting comparison point and sebastian what was your latest wow moment

uh so i will say my favorite one so far was just how darn good vampire survivors is highly recommend the game it's it's really fun to be the bullet hell you've always wanted to be so i would say it's really cool to see these game ecosystems and sort of creativity from people and it's going to be a lot of fun oh and the new pokemon game is great i think that's like it under underrated somehow despite being really good i don't know the game of the vampires actually oh vampire survivors highly recommend it i think it's like two or three us dollars it's on steam i think it might be on epic store it is a roguelike where you're the bullet hell and you got to kill a lot of vampires yeah that sounds like a nutshell yeah no it's literally that simple and it's freaking fun i have to i have to go check it out i might have to buy a computer i've never owned a gaming computer oh god but the best part about it is that you can play

on really bad computers as well although that's a little bit laggy and so it's actually easier ones a little bit laggy because you can sort of dodge things a little bit faster but overall highly recommend it again i thought you had a super computer oh i have no issues with this i'm just saying you know that this is this is the design philosophy they have well it was lovely to have you on the podcast it was good to i think i think the topics hopefully will be helpful to what we're saying at the beginning at the beginning of the episode someone out there trying to make these decisions i hope that we managed to help you even if it's just the one percent and yeah if you want to continue this discussion you can join navic's discord we're there if you want to share your comments or your feedback my email's in the show notes i love to hear from you and i think we'll sign off and see you next week in the next episode [Music]

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