The Renaissance Is Back — Here's What Game Devs Have to Say About It

[Music] one thing I love about Pocket Gamer meeting new faces but also catching up with old ones who've been on the show yes on the Pocket Gamer podcast you can listen in you can hear timu from metap playay and uh Timo great to be here in your in your throne room here the whole Renaissance feeling going on love the chairs checking out the magazine that we will be talking about a bit I mean first of all to have a paper a piece of paper something physical and not just that right you actually not only did your right part of it but let's let's see what what's the likeness here I would say something I'm I'm thinking Game of Thrones meets Robin Hood here but yes Renaissance very cool it's got It's got a touch

and that picture actually is from Pocket Gamer GDC Edition oh wow okay yeah I keep you're resourceful you you reuse everything so tell me about it tell me about metap playay tell me about the very cool AI generated although it looks like every rembrand you know that we've ever had to study that I studied in college because I did do this I did liberal artart so I got to have fun geeking out on Art now I'm going to talk about geeking out on games metop playay you were one of our you were one of our best shows actually on Pocket Gamer because you had so much to share what's going on over there these days right so we obviously we're backend vendor working with a bunch of uh high-end game developers working on new things emphasis on new things so what we're here for with the whole game development Renaissance is we're talking about what is the next new thing that people actually excited about right like it's been this Doom and Gloom scenario for basically the last two years for good reason

but now statistically speaking we interviewed 140 or so developers and asked what makes them excited about the next year like where's the possibility and obviously we w't be there to help um but you can obviously get this whole ebook from our site if you want a print copy better Visa Booth be quick but for example people are seeing big opportunity not just necessarily with AI but new tools and Technologies enabling games that they could not do before that maybe now has an audience right that wasn't available two years ago or finding some other way to stand out while still feeling creative and excited about what they do that's what I'm hearing as well because yes I've had enough Doom and Gloom I'm I'm way too optimistic for this stuff and I've been hearing it ever since the co bump disappeared like it was a bad thing that Co stopped right um but anyway you talk about it and uh you think about new things and in many cases the those new

things are going for the niche going very much for the niche and not thinking so much about the mainstream popularity and success as well yeah absolutely and actually we have some of our customers game uh up on the pedestals here which I think is just a lovely example of that for example uh one big trend is crossplay or multiplatform gameplay where you can have that Niche audience but when you combine multiple platforms together maybe suddenly it's a big enough audience that you're able to reach it and like bring it over and and like make a good showing out of it we have another one uh venue which looking fantastic that's more for a female audience so then the the aesthetic is I want to say beautiful and it just attracts or is like marketable to something other than the traditional mainstream and we even have big magic that does completely AI generated worlds so then now we're even talking about something where nobody knows what that is going to be like but now they're able to explore you writing a prompt and the AI generating a full on playable 3D

World with your own rules so is that more like a Roblox sandboxy experience or what what is we don't know we're exploring it and those are they they are niches until they suddenly aren't right but you start from there start with a specific audience in mind with a very specific uh hypothesis for your business and then let's see how much we can scale it and that's really exciting speaking of scale what are you doing because of course you're about the back end and freeing them up to build the game games that's really at the core of metap playay but how have you evolved in the last year since we spoke to Mo that's a good so much has happened uh seen a lot heard a lot but let's from you fair enough so obviously we've we've signed up more customers than we have throughout the last four years of our company's existence so as in uh people are finding metap playay we are now seeing whole portfolios of investment companies start to sort of recommend us

for the new startup so that's exciting I that's a sign of trust that we don't take lightly that we starting to work with sort of top tier uh startups that's exciting from business point of view but's maybe happening on the product side which I'm more passionate about personally is that we have uh for example talking a lot with these top end developers like supercell and rier and so on to understand what does it look like when you have a team of 150 developers and now you're managing this content Road mapap for your billion dollar game what tools do you need then and that turns out they're way more visual so for example our latest release as of two weeks ago in our sbk we added this visual timeline where you can start to see as a calendar view everything you have going on in the past of your game currently what's happening next week or two months down the line so your whole team can maybe open that up on a big TV and start to sort of more visually understand what kind of uh scheduling are we going to what kind of experience is this game going to be it was always there but now if you can make it understandable then you're able to scale your game team in complexity when

previously you would kind of halt so there's there's many type of scaling happening um and those are the ones that I find most interesting what we're going to do next though um not going to promise anything because talking about future but what we may or may not be launching soon is that we'll be opening this up even more so we'll have a complete selfservice system where we'll host your servers for you and we'll be we're already managing hundreds of Game servers we're taking up to tens of thousands of Game servers and dropping the price so that we we can just take care of that side of boring scaling on game dev's behalf but again you know business product it's doing all these things in parallel it's excited about what you said for the big teams because I've spoken with Publishers and of course IP is so important but IP Dem manage that is a huge challenge especially if it's a big IP I won't name it but the woman I was speaking with she was like yes you know we had to be in

line they had a movie coming out you know so you get the idea where I'm going here and that needs to be planned in a certain way and then also all the content all the fresh content and all the live Ops around it all right absolutely and I mentioned venue uh on one of those games that's it's a sort of home decoration Style game which means you have absolutely tens of thousands of unique assets of homes and carpets and chairs and to tr your decoration system so really what you can solving for is how do we manage this absolutely massive inventory of art or content and then just in time when we finally figure it out maybe we do a campaign with a news magazine or maybe we do a movie tie in or something how do we super flexibly just throw that stuff in the moment we get the deals done and we finally like lock it in without going into that half a year development cycle that maybe at some point finally comes out and if you miss the movie window your business is shafted for that campaign for example so

it's absolutely part of the problem um it's a very Pro boring problem to solve takes a lot of programming but it's actually kind of exciting when you when you as a developer when you're working with tools that makes this possible because now you're able to chase these deals or be able to work with these other creatives to do interesting crossovers when previously it was just too much work for example it's also fascinating that the backend business that you were in has evolved so much and of course when we're talking about being creative we cannot ignore AI that is that is the core of creativity and now I was reading something recently which is like you know we all know that you win with creative but there's like battle cries out there you know the battle is fought and won with creative what does that look like on the back end and what you're supporting as well because there are a lot of tools out there and you sort of get the feeling that hey I can do this this can be a one man one woman one person show yeah but it can't if you are going for scale correct yeah now

it's something that's that's an open research so I'm not going to claim any silver bullets but we this is something that literally days before we flew in here we just spent multiple days talking about reading the latest white papers coming out of AI generation and trying to understand where that is and where that's going to go specifically for us in in backend development it seems like there's there's a lot of this um special knowledge for example like hidden knowledge about how you do uh server authoritative games or how do you how do you implement a scalable ior system or something that as a developer you have to really quickly pick up and then go with and for example AI I think will be the most efficient way of transferring knowledge between developers or bit from us to developers it it'll be your personal tutor if you will your personal coach in learning the best practices of the industry whether it's in sort of design detail or more like technical implementation detail uh I'd love metap playay to have that sort

of a coach um let's see if we can make it happen at some point um but then beyond that I'm very confident that this year we're going to see more sort of generated programming assistance become absolutely integral to the development workflow hopefully we can teach those AI to be really good at what metap playay does we're still kind of looking at that um and we are absolutely already seeing generative art become something that's part of liveops so we have customers that for example in their admin dashboards they're able to prompt together uh seasonal event assets or like prototype real quickly looks and feels which are smaller teams but I think what what it's still at the end of the day what it needs is somebody who's got the vision of what they want and that they're able to express the vision so you still have that um talented developer kind of orchestrating and being the King of the Hill so it doesn't really like take away or completely magic away the thing it empowers those best individuals to the work with smaller teams and I think

we're going to see that this year I like that that you're going for like the small team but also the big CU it's basically very similar it's just a matter of how to implement it so it makes sense it has to be manageable for a small team it has to grow to meet the needs of a big team and I've watched you since we had our interview and I come here and I say to myself you know it's it takes something to go back a little bit as well and pull out the the learnings of the past I mean Renaissance having a magazine talking to people doing a survey you went out and talked to people so you're bringing together those worlds as well so I have to ask myself Timo about your backstory because there's got to be something there that's that's driving this that uh isn't what you would expect this is not what I would have expected so I'm surprised there's got to be something surprising in your story as well very kind words thank you um honestly I think all of this first of all it's a team effort so massive thanks to to everybody who's been part of this um I think honestly

these are learnings from having had game studios in the past you need to do something that stands out that is interesting it's not enough to just exist you want to do something that's kind of Sparks you know a little bit of joy and in this case we're saying the the concept of Renaissance is that after a dark time an art form starts to thrive and that's the emotion that's what we want so then let's let's lean into the emotion so that's maybe the games games developer side of us bubbling through a little bit I mean it's about time right we had Doom and Gloom we had idfa we had scan we had a lot going on that it just seemed very heavy very difficult there was so much to learn and now we're going back to what it was about creativity good games and a solid system you know you have to have you have to have system process in order to be successful so I'm looking forward to talking with you again chimu and looking forward to some

of those things that are coming maybe not coming but we shall see so leave us with a thought to take us into the new year something that maybe since you're such a positive person something that marketers have at their fingertips maybe don't see it and you want to shine a light on that because guess what there's a lot possible oh boy if like can I pick like 10 things 10 things are 10 10 things they're not seeing right 10 things they're not seeing that's saying a lot I mean I do think that we do tend to dwell as an industry we really dwell so zoom out give me a bigger picture something that we don't know we have the power to do so we actually do it yeah I I'll take the question seriously I'm like Ponder for about two seconds but so what I've been thinking lately about a lot actually even here talking with like fellow conference attendees is the attention econ as a concept where I and I'll keep it

short but the idea that as long as you have attention we nowadays have pretty good tools of turning that attention into Capital as in if you have eyeballs you can give maybe you can have a game or maybe you can have merchandise or something so as long as you have attention you have an audience so what we're not really doing all that much which surprises me is talking more with the sort of e-commerce giants like whether the alib Babas or Amazon or other companies of the world that have a lot of attention going on Tik Tok has a lot of attention so where are the game platform tie-ins that from the platform's point of view is good retention it's good engagement has amazing crossovers with other things that they're doing this would be a dream come true from game developers point of view because the audience is already there and now we have all the technology and tools in the world to actually Chase it quickly but it just hasn't hasn't been really done before so I'm just like

excited to see what PE what kind of deals people are making here in the shadows um and that that's something's going to emerge so talking to existing platform holders that are not just Publishers but sort of attention owners if that makes sense that does makes sense I heard something like that at roio con that I attended as well that thinking that um you know what do you want do you want a good game made from a game Studio or do you want a brand to make a game that could be hit or because you know how many games do we know made by unnamed um financial institutions or e-commerce platforms it's like yeah that that was a match game I'll give you that but it wasn't it wasn't a hit and it's not what we want to be playing exactly so there's so much more that can happen in that in something that feels authentic and it's like me as a fan that I can get excited by but then you you combine the lack of Discovery and them having an audience with the the quality that you can bring to play so new channels essentially looking for new

ways to go to market also specifically I'm kind of interested in telegram blowing up lately we do have a customer that is shipping in in telegram so we have a little bit of visibility into all of that so again it's such a unexpected gaming platform that suddenly has hundreds of millions of people ready to go if only you have the technical means and the mind space to like go there and we know that model Works look at WeChat right so why would it work in telegram 100% absolutely and they even now have their off off app purchases store which we've been talking about off app purchase for a while as an industry so we should know how to do that um something something use metap playay but like there's you know when there's a wheel this away we we can do this I like that it's such a joy chimu and it's contagious now you've got me thinking yes this is going to be an awesome year for the gaming industry you're on this show is all about about how to do your job better how to make an

amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market and all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz SLP podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next

edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm Peggy and saltz and that's a wrap until next week