The Shifting Landscape of the Gaming Industry in 2024 with Newzoo's Ben Porter

hey and welcome to the deconstructor of fun podcast I'm your host Mish Katka and in this episode I'm joined by Ben Porter director of Consulting at newu this podcast is going to be about the new's latest um report we're going to talk about four main topics we're going to talk about the industry Trends including the shifting landscape of player engagement post lockdown competition from other media consumption sources and the impact of Technologies like he uh we're going to talk about console market growth as the second topic so factors like Peak install base or whether we have reached it nextg content and potential new Nintendo device and how is that going to affect the the console growth uh as a third topic we're going to talk about opportunities for breakout success with games like battle Bid And Hell divers 2 uh that cater to specific niches and finally we're going to talk about how the industry is reshaping meaning how companies are adapting by

focusing on profitability utilizing new technologies and exploring Cod development hope you enjoyed the podcast I join the discussion about the episode on our deconstructor of fun slack channel uh you can access the channel by going to DEC constructor. comom the instructor of fun.com and then there's a slack group so apply and finally if you like content like this sign up to our newsletter give us a thumbs up or a few of those precious stars um on whatever podcast platform you are listening to and this type of stuff really helps it encourages us to do more content like this and um anyways ladies and gentlemen Ben Porter from [Music] newu this podcast is brought to you by apps flyer in today's Digital World understanding your app's Journey from Discovery to download is more than just insightful it's essential and enter apps

flyer the leader in Mobile attribution and marketing analytics that allows you to measure the full potential of your marketing efforts making every ad dollar Works Smarter with apps flyer that's your new reality dive deep into Data driven insights that reveal exactly where you users come from and how they interact with your app apps sler where your app's potential meets performance thank you very much uh happy to be here you're new's director of cons Consulting now what is newu and what do you do Ben yeah great question so newo is a uh Boutique Market intelligence and data firm specializing in the games industry our sort of tagline is that we have data covering um the games Gamers and the games market and in terms of who we work with that's often game developers game Publishers uh but it can also be say companies that are not directly involved

in the creation of or distribution of video games but also um Brands let's say or financial institutions that are investing in games uh brands that want to learn how to activate uh Gamers as an audience and in terms of myself and what I do like you said I'm the head of the uh Consulting in newu and in terms of the types of work that we do we we work with clients again primarily in the game development publishing on uh things like their game greenlighting process uh go to market strategies um business strategy and the types of projects we take on look like totally addressable Market uh sales forecasting mergers and acquisition support uh these types of uh these types of projects and for a couple of episodes Tom wman he's currently on a paternity leave uh with a second child and he uh friendly referred the Consulting arm is just reading the reports that they create but apparently much more than uh than read out out loud

the uh the reports that uh that that the uh research team does well he's not entirely wrong and we have to give credit where credit is due so uh definitely a big shout out to Tom and the crew for for putting together some pretty amazing reports for us to read out yeah and today we're going to talk about the latest report um very insightful very interesting very um how would I say scary at it at some points yeah fair so so let me ask you like a high level question like what is the uh the pulse of the gaming market right now because on a high level we can we see layoffs that's happening every week uh we're about 8,000 in 2024 where the overall number was 10,000 in 2023 and that is probably not even accounting all the the startups that are going to go or are already going under uh sure the we see at the same time people are talking about recovery there's always like these graphs like Hey we're back into the uh into the growth it's a small growth up

we up here uh then your report the latest one was was uh was talking about playtime declining uh the market is consolidating on mobile but as well as on PC and console for a long time so uh can you give a high level pulse of where we are right now with the gaming Market absolutely yeah we're we're in a a bit of a a a downturn or a trough in the market and I don't think this is in many ways when we've spoken to people about this or when we've showed shown this data to to folks people are are intuitively saying yeah okay this is what I think is happening but I haven't really seen the data to support it so I don't think I don't think it's necessarily surprising to anyone I think it's just not necessarily been articulated in this way and like you said there's these um there's these sort of data points that we've been getting through the gaming media around layoffs um right sizing of companies U you could call it maybe there was overinvestment earlier uh in in the 2020s uh off the back of of Co for example um and now we're kind of coming and coming down a

little bit right sizing the industry uh settling into sort of a new norm and there's also just the there has been a fundamental shift in terms of how players are spending their time in the types of games that are successful and and the types of games that are heavily entrenched as well which the report gets into yeah this is this is interesting the uh the concept of a new Norm uh it's uh and that is H not only in the gaming industry but overall like even listening to um let's say fund managers when they're talking about inflation rates this is or or when they're talking about interest rates they're actually interest rates more they're talking about that this is a this is a normal interest rate what we have been accustomed to for the past uh what 14 or about 14 years almost is a kind of like the zero interest rates environment which is boosting the economy quite significantly and companies are focusing much more growth

and on profitability and now things are normal it's not even a high interest rate it's just a normal interest rate and you're saying the same thing is like gaming industry has definitely benefited from from this growth mindset that we've had in the market for over a decade and now things are just normalizing and the size of the industry is uh in terms of Workforce in terms of the amount of projects going on is just normalizing is that um is that the uh the correct assessment that's a very fair statement absolutely oh and one thing that your reports don't show is are actually three things inflation adjustment so yes inflation is still relatively High higher than the 2% that we are in most Western countries targeting it's not showing web shop revenues so that's something that that many uh Publishers especially on mobile have been pushing forward and and gain a lot of traction and it's not showing ad Revenue which is quite significant especially on mobile

but it has been coming in on Console it has been coming on streaming services so now that the companies are again moving out of growth at all means they're going to profitability and they're you know you can get your Netflix's with ads you can get your Spotify now with ads and I mean Spotify was always with ads but but uh even they are pushing forward so all these services are leaning more into ads as additional source of Revenue yeah absolutely and um I think you see this a little bit I think it was six months ago or so SAA Nadella had his um his compensation package uh altered whereas in the past it was um Game Pass was a was a line there for uh increasing the number of subscribers and I want to say six months ago it was actually changed to revenue growth which perfectly aligns with what you're saying right so if you're trying to grow subscriber base you're going to make very different decisions in terms of

um you know how you position Game Pass and if you're going for Revenue then again you're going to see things like let's say exclusive titles start to come to other platforms which is exactly what what is happening in a small way to begin with you know it wouldn't be weird for that to accelerate or um or for further changes to take place there you've heard of heroic Labs by now and we keep talking about them because in today's mature Market you need every Edge to be successful rather than spending those precious company dollars on building game Tech focus on building your game and shipping it get into your players hands faster and grow your community heroic Labs is Battle tested partner and friend of the podcast their Tech enables you to be flexible creative and scale for Success heroic Labs has your Tech stack covered whether you're looking for a worldclass backend game server an amazing game development framework Fantastic live Ops to wiing or reliable Mass scalability heroic Labs has solutions for all of these challenges and it's not just just us a deconstructor of fun praising heroic

Labs the company works with some of the world's biggest Publishers on many of the Beloved games focus on your game save a big chunk of cheese and avoid Tech risks with heroic [Music] labs this podcast is brought to you by data AI now you're asking didn't they get acquired by sensor Tower they did and that's awesome here's why what do you loved using data. or sensor Tower the combined company will offer customers even stronger and more detailed insights on the full Digital customer Journey exciting times lie ahead as sensor Tower and data I join forces go to data. or sensor tower.com and get on board with undeniably the best data partner in the business now back to the episode yeah got it so okay so right sizing is is the the correct term and in terms of the growth like like years showing that there's a small growth 1 to

2% overall in the market that is going to be happening for the next several years if we adjust that to inflation could we say that that's almost a decline or uh same size of the market I think that's a pretty fair statement and uh we'll probably dive into that or well we we might I don't want to put words in Tom's mouth but maybe I will maybe I will put words in to I think we'll probably dive into that in our report that will come out uh later this year the uh uh games market report and forecast the sort of Flagship one yeah I just wanted to point that one out because the the common like when when the title says we are recovering we're back on growth it's a it's misleading because if you adjust that to inflation it's not on back on growth and what that causes is that the other the people who don't read through it or don't understand the impacts of inflation especially people working in in game development are saying why are you laying off people if we are growing

again and when we adjust this we are not growing many companies are actually declining sure yeah no I think that's a fair statement and growth is not equal across all companies that's another uh really key Point uh and one other Nuance here in terms of how we report on uh on revenues um you also have currency effects because we report in US Dollars and so there there is some Nuance here where uh for example the Japanese Yen or in South Korea or with China their respective currencies are somewhat down against the US dollar so when we have when we take the sort of Revenue and the spending that's taking place in those markets they may be let's say relatively healthy but then you convert them to a currency that is unfavorable and that also you know you know further worsens the impact as well so there is some Nuance there uh but I I think your point overall does stand uh absolutely yeah okay yeah I just wanted to kind of like Get the the PSE of because often times

it feels that it comes overly positive it's not overly negative either but there's uh there there's a it's I would say there's an inconsistent sentiment or inconsistent message when when we're talking about getting back on growth and then we're talking about layoffs in the next sentence it's like how does this compute this makes no sense so it's really interesting to dive kind of deeper into into the market and understand how these two things are happening simultaneously so that's a very so so let's talk about PC console Outlook because newu is is really focused on PC and console so the other half of the of the market we we mostly talk about Mobile on this podcast but we've been talking more about console and PC so um this is something that we've discussed with Tom for a couple last episodes and that is really the uh the problem of the three simultaneous business models so games as a service so live games premium games and subscription catalogs all all kind of competing for the same thing which is

players time and then at the same time as the report shows the audience size is quite stagnant it's not growing as fast as as it needs to be to uphold all these different business models and on top of that like the latest report is talking about declining play time which is even more scary for uh for you know for any kind of a service so my question is kind of like looking at looking at the graph is like why is console the slowest growing by far so it's it's it's uh it shows in your graphs it's less than 2% year-over-year growth which is um which is technically decline if we count in inflation and then we have PC games growing at about 4% which we could say is same size yep fair so um in the console Market uh last year we did have um I

assume you're you're referring to the 2023 growth is what you're referring to specifically or yes yeah yeah yeah 2023 yeah so last year we did have um quite a release slate of tripa kind of Blockbuster Games on console and PC um and we actually anticipated that console was going to grow significantly more if you were to go back uh in time a little bit you'd see that we had a significantly higher growth rate pegged for console I remember it was like 7% or something yeah you got it exactly and so uh what ended up happening when we when we look back on this year um and again we when we make these uh I should say when Tom is making these uh these Market sizing numbers he's uh uh we're starting from company Financial so we're looking at like what's actually reported and we augment that with our data and we try and triangulate as well but what we found was that actually um while these premium titles did do exceptionally well on Console it was cannibalistic with

live service so there wasn't sort of a overall growth of the P within within console um counter to that in 2023 we actually were a little bit more pessimistic on PC um but what ended up happening there is that live service did sustain better than we anticipated uh and the premium titles that were crossplatform also did better than we anticipated on PC specifically um so we were probably overly ambitious on Console um ear earlier than than what reality reflected got it so PC really doing better because of the live services that they have and I mean PC has some fun like how would I even call like Monumental live services like whether we're talking about counter strikes of League of Legends or doas or or valerant they are yeah they're absolutely you know amazing but the same kind of exists on Mo on on Console as well like the madens the fifas they seem to be doing really really well every year almost better every year and um and and you're

saying basically so the titles like the uh the balers Gates and the um Diablo 4S and and other ones because they were crossplatform so they kind of lifted the PC even more or is that a correct assessment yeah correct they lifted PC more whereas the cannibalistic effects were greater on the console side and I think like the console side of gaming is a little bit more attuned to the premium side of the market uh whereas PC is a little bit more attuned to the live service side of the market like you said there's several uh very significant uh you know pillars of live service games on PC that aren't even available on on Console at all right so that that's a little bit of where that lopsided uh results came from would it be also POS like what do you think about this I'm I'm when I'm looking at the PC market I think it's more Innovative in terms of uh the type of games that they are through Steam of course uh there's just much I I mean the uh the catalog is much

more unique much more interesting and there are you know most of these games are small but they are you know sudden hits like the the uh the battle bits of the world and the um um I don't know pal World probably not ready or not pal World battle bait is probably a good example of that yes yeah absolutely it's just due to the nature of it uh of Steam not being um gatee kept in the same way that and I don't use that word in a negative way curated sorry that's the better word steam is less curated than let's say Xbox or Playstation or switch and that allows for this Innovation to thrive and you have this huge long tail of uh indie games on PC that are a little less prevalent uh on on the console side of things and it allows for this Innovation it allows for these games to come out of literally nowhere uh and you know suddenly sell like 2 3 5 six seven million copies uh or like power world you know over 20 and M and and shake

things up or sort of shift the Paradigm a little bit but often as you said they're not necessarily the largest titles they can they can be large they can grow to be large but not exclusively so I agree PC is very Innovative that's a huge huge source of strength for for the PC platform yeah and and launching overall on Steam is made much more easier than it is on consoles like as you said there's less curation if you will but there are also more tools like you can be in uh in private beta you can have all these beta access where essentially you're live but you're not quite live like you set the expectations lower so you can get quicker in the market get your first set of Revenue to continue development Etc these type of tools just don't exist on Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo they are much more you know Q rated if you yeah that probably the better word to say closed and they kind of like expect you to be uh on your best behavior when you enter their platforms unlike with steam it's just you can get voted out so yeah AB absolutely um no I 100% agree

with that uh when when we talk about like the major levers for growth on PC console what would those be like how can these you know these two markets get back to growth or more significant growth let's put it that way yeah that's a more tricky question and I think um if you look at 2024's release late like it is a little bit lighter in terms of AAA like I don't think Sony has um a tent pole franchise like a god of war or Spider-Man or something that's coming out in the in the coming year um so that you know the actual content is a big component of that um shifts in technology can of course help with this as well but you know we're in a bit of a weird console generation because we had uh Co which sort of had all eyes on video games but then during that time you had these supply chain challenges so people

couldn't actually get their hands on nextg consoles um so it is a bit of a it is a bit of a tricky generation but of course when you do have generational changes that can be uh an Initiative for growth the switch was obviously a massive push for growth and then business model adaptations right like freeo play uh we talk about that often in the context of mobile but freeo playay was massive for uh the PC and console side of the business as well if you didn't have free to play like there's no way that that the PC console audience would be as large as it is today um so I think the innovating in these sort of Realms are are going to be the areas that that will continue to drive growth I don't have a magic formula for what that looks like um and then when we skip ahead to talking a little bit about some of the success stories which you were touching on already with palor and and balers gate and whatnot um I think catering to specific audience also really helps right a lot of those games that we saw

that were success stories they came out and they filled kind of very specific gaps uh in the market um you know that is a way to sort of continue growing as well albeit it doesn't necessarily move the needle as massively as you know introducing a new fortnite or something to uh to the game on that note actually ugc I think this is a big Next Step uh well it's already here but that is a that is a um a growth pillar that uh I'm interested to see how that continues to unfold over time between Roblox ufn on fortnite and um the other sort of sandbox platforms as well yeah that's okay that's that's interesting I I took a couple of things here and I have also a couple of questions for you so um there's there's a questions of accessibility like accessibility on PC is quite low like people can build their own PCS the PCS are not that expensive and they're quite um budget friendly if you want to

upgrade you can upgrade your gpus you can upgrade anything any pieces just pull in and put a new one and and that that machine can keep on going consoles on the other hand are becoming increasingly more expensive and then they are also these sort of a uh content fortresses like there's games you can play only PlayStation there's games you can play only on Xbox and sometimes there's a game you can play on playstation and PC but you can't play that game on Console which oh sorry on on on Xbox it's kind of like yeah yeah so so so so especially like the PC x uh Playstation Xbox competition so uh one thing that that I'm that I'm seeing is like the uh the accessibility of these the the devices are very expensive and they're not you know you can't upgrade them you always have to get the next one that comes in like five to seven years afterwards and and and all the all the titles to it it's it's it's just an expensive expensive device to have and to to keep updating the second part that

uh that I feel is restricting the growth I don't know what you think about this is the uh the quality requirement is like you know Ubisoft is jokingly saying that they're making like five no it wasn't Ubisoft it was CD project so Ubisoft said that the uh the the Skull and Bones was quadruple triple quadruple a and then CD project said like it's a 5xa project that they're doing next so it's kind of like jokingly saying but it's true like the cost of making a game just keeps on increasing and cost of of shipping a game continues on so publishing or or doing the marketing for is is increasing so that's sort of a quality requirement on not only how much it has to cost to make a game uh and and Market it but also this same type of a quality um Quality how do I call it like a threshold a requirement seems to be going to these Publishers when they're making a live service game they feel like it has to be exactly the same quality as their as their premium titles

but now they're going to do life service so the size of a team and the investment to do content treadmill on a game that costs like $200 million to make is just sounds as astonishing um so so what do you think about the uh sort of like my my notion of accessibility and and quality requirements sort of a in a in a way restricting the growth I I think it's a 100% uh bang on I mean there's huge frictions to becoming a console player or a PC player just just getting into it and like you said if you have a PC you can kind of continue to upgrade it over time but the initial investment of getting a PC in the first place is really uh is really quite high and when we look at Emerging Markets uh this isn't reflected in our um part part of this is reflected in our PC console growth but we see uh there is a lot of growth in these Emerging Markets I think uh you know Latin America Middle East North Africa um southeast Asia so on so forth are

continuing to uh to grow at a higher Pace um but the growth that you see there is coming from a smaller base and it's really being outstripped by mobile like the mobile growth in those markets is significantly higher and again because you get this one device that sort of does everything in your life it's much easier to make that investment than it is to make an investment in like a dedicated uh device for playing games so I think accessibility plays sort of a huge role there um and maybe that's where some of this uh crossplatform there's a lot of a lot of Buzz around releasing on PC console and mobile um not necessarily the same skew but just having some element across all all three platforms um and on the same on the other side of what you were saying 100% the the cost for making games is uh is continuing to go to the moon but on on top of that it's also the time to make a game um for some of these games we're looking at six years plus to uh to

deliver them and that's becoming like fairly normal for the development cycle for for some of these really big AAA uh you know console exclusives and whatnot that you know you're only going to put one of those out every few years and you can only have a couple of those in the pipeline sort of marinating at any given point and then you're taking bigger and bigger bets every time as well which means that you really also need it to succeed um and that causes other issues like squiz and whatnot yeah it's it's an interesting interesting thing with the uh with the with the sort of a qu like I don't know if quality is a wrong word production values let's put it that way I think that's right so with the with the production values because it feels like the production values are being pushed up by the team itself so they want to do better than they last time and they want to impress critics uh with with the uh with the production values um but when we look at the games that are you know that break through in this incredibly competitive market like we're not talking about the Call of Duties or or the new madens we're

talking about pal Worlds the battle bits the hell divers the Bowers gate 3es these are not games that are known for exceptional production values like they have good enough production values absolutely and and and that is that is sort of a that is sort of a interesting thing is like it's it's almost not user focused or a player focused when these production values are discussed it's just it's just internal mentality or craftsmanship to to to push it to such a high level where it's almost unsustainable for most of the titles in development yeah and I think one element of that is uh there's at least a perception that audiences are trained and sort of adapted to want this new iteration in production values so the God of War audience wants the next God of War to be even just like that much better than the previous God of War like that's at least a going assumption as far as I would you know as an observer would say now whether or not that's true

I think that's uh that's a good question for something like hell divers clearly it's coming out of left field um and people may not have had those expectations of that title so when they get in it's just really fun um flipping over though the other thing that sort of bucks the CH the trend the sort of antithesis to all of this is Nintendo where you look at the switch which is um you know that that Hardware was uh not even necessarily the most Cutting Edge graph processors and whatnot when it launched and now we're 7even years on into the cycle and you look at the games that are being put out for that they really good games look at the most recent teers of the Kingdom that's a beautiful game um but it's I would say way more stylized than it is let's say graphically intensive if that makes sense and you know you look at Pokemon and other things like that so it does it does sort of manage to Buck the trend these are still beautiful games they're still amazing but they're they're not really requiring the latest and greatest Graphics they do still take time and

they do still take a lot of money so don't get me wrong actually that part still holds but uh it is just interesting um you know taking that same hell divers analogy across to to Nintendo and looking what that whole company's sort of strategy is it's almost in some ways almost in opposition to what you see u in other parts of the market yeah it's interesting it's it's very very interesting to follow follow this um but something you were talking about is the uh mobile titles um or something you refer to so let me I kind of forgot so let me let me jump into the sort of a mobile expansion of PC and console Publishers so if I understand this correctly this is being uh pushed by the fact that as we discussed the console and PC market is very concentrated it's very difficult to break through we'll talk about that in a moment and the second H fact is that the mobile games generate half of all the gaming revenues and if you're doing really well on console you're still getting about like 25% of all the revenues if you're doing

really well on PCN console you might be doing the 50 but you're not looking at the other 50% so kind of like if you're a business person it's the easiest uh way to double your revenues is also to succeed on the market that you don't exist rather than fighting the incumbents on the highly competitive markets that you are and then the final fact is that every single person who plays these PC console games has a mobile device that they can play any of these games and they're likely playing some of these games so it's not like you have to get them to buy a certain type of device they already have it it's in their pocket and they're actually using it more than they're using the other devices to play other games so uh can you talk a little bit more about uh when when for example you're working with your clients is how are they looking at mobile uh after they've you know found their foothold on PC and console great question it's yeah what you said is exactly right and there is a slide on this in in the report as well where we talk about um

the overlap of PC console and mobile players and I think we we say uh something like 32% of players are playing on um two platforms uh at the same time and then there's 15% of players that are playing across all three platforms uh and what we do know is that when you are playing this is and this is very logical right I'm not going to say anything that's that's sort of groundbreaking but the data sort of backs this up but when you're playing on multiple platforms and you're um able to engage more right engagement just goes up I think in the report we say average play time goes from four hours a week if you have a single platform up to uh almost 12 hours a week so it's it's tripling if you have um if you're playing on three platforms uh so that's mobile PC console but likewise uh if you're able to engage significantly more then your spending is also going up and I think everybody sort of looked at successes like achin impact

for example and their crossplatform release and they're they're kind of trying to ask like how do we get a piece of that how do we sort of access that I now in the same breath I think it's also really challenging to be able to do that because there's a lot of questions that you need to be able to answer the mobile market does not look the same it does not operate the same as PC console uh so your your demographics and your audience are going to shift um you need to consider that your whole monetization model needs to be in line um you need to consider are you going to have uh one skew of the game that allows mobile players and PC console players to engage at the same time or are you going to make different SKS and perhaps have cross progression instead of actual crossplay um so there's a lot of things to sort a lot of sort of nuance to take into consideration there but you're absolutely right that it's I think it's easy to shrug it off and not consider the mobile market it's also very easy to make sort of misconceptions and and and sort of dive into the mobile market without taking all the right things in consideration but I think it's quite

hard and not that many games have really pulled it off expertly yet so there's few that we can kind of learn from at this point yeah it's it's also a little bit crazy because when you look at the the mobile market the mobile market turned very difficult after the Privacy changes it has been declining so there is even more problems on mobile compared to console and PC so we're seeing mobile Publishers looking at PC as a potential growth Market we're seeing console Publishers looking at PC as a growth Market um we see mobile Publishers coming on PC using the tactics that were successful in Mobile and probably are not going to be successful in a different device with a different user base with a different expectations and we're seeing console PC Publishers coming to mobile and using the same tactics same mization models that they use on PC or console and finding that very difficult to um you know to make it work in in the like we saw Warframe coming in on mobile absolute tank like

like just uh tank of a game and tanked as a game on mobile despite doing for a decade really well on PC we're seeing now the Call of Duty uh war war zone coming in from Activision on on all platforms and definitely doing at least in the in the first month significantly worse than their mobile specific version so it seems like it seems like that is the most challenging part unless you have game games like like team fight tactics or the hear stones that don't sort of a require specific control scheme where you can play on a level Playfield no matter what size of your screen is um that's that's going to be interesting to see but when when you're talking to your clients like how is crossplatform for them more interesting than sort of these brand extensions where they put a version of their game on mobile you mean by crossplatform you mean true cross platform play yes yes um yeah that's a

good one I don't I would it's hard to say that that that they're fixed on one way or the other I think it's more of a question what do we do like and then there's you know oftentimes what we're doing is we're looking into what are other people doing like how are other people succeeding in this space and what and where are the failures right and so a lot of it can be kind of digging into what other what other teams have done and I think the tough the tough part about this is finding what is the right way to approach it for your IP for your game and that's always going to be on a sort of Title by title IP by IP Company by company basis so it's just very difficult to make any sort of sweeping um assessment about that because what works for gench and impact or what works for like you said um the Call of Duty is not necessarily working for war zone for example so um yeah but I wouldn't say they're necessarily fixated on one specific way and I guess what we've seen is when we

look at at least the mobile side coming over there's a few different sort of ways that people are looking at this one is okay we have a game on mobile we're going to just Huck it on PC because then it's available for people and that's just you know again you're meeting players where they are so you're upping that engagement um you can look at doing sort of true crossplay um so that's usually building a new game from the feed up maybe with an existing IP to try and follow the sort of genchan impact model um you can look at Cross progression uh so I you know you've got a game that operates on PC console a separate version of that game operating on mobile but you're able to kind of cross progress between the two games uh but then the final version that we saw and this is kind of an interesting one may maybe unique is uh with shiftup specifically um they are from the niik goddess of war team if you're familiar with that mobile title they're actually they're actually coming to uh to

PlayStation 5 with an exclusive uh Stellar blade I'm not sure if you've uh if you seen any Buzz about that one which is quite interesting so they're actually as far as I can tell they're not even carrying their IP over they're just making a net new game that's sort of a PS5 exclusive and I see that as more of a sorry same art style with the same art style there's there's let's say similar Aesthetics um and I think um really that's a desire like you said to to tap into a different Market but it's also a desire to get oh out of the Yoke of like let's say a single Master right so if you're if you're only operating on mobile you're you're largely uh your success is is largely influenced by let's say apple and and the Android Stores um there are these sort of uh new marketplaces that are popping up but I think they just want an opportunity to sort of get to diversify their revenue streams away from from just those two places places interesting yeah understandable

and and then that is as I said like it's the uh it's the easiest type of a growth at least on paper when you just enter a new market and and yeah on paper but then when the when the rubber hits the road it's always a little bit different it's like the expectations and everything you learned is just going to be different uh We've uh you know I have friends who've moved from mobile being at mobile for a decade and then mov to a to a AAA Studio to work on what ever whether they are working on the product side or whether they are working on production side or design side the uh the everything is different from the pace of work to expectations to the vocabulary to to to you you name it and and despite these people playing the same games and and being in the in the in the game industry for so long um it's a it's just a it's just a different market so it's very interesting to see how they are able to bring their expertise and and adjust to uh to a same audience with different expectations if you will uh yeah 100% step into the

future of game monetization with exola exola empowers developers and Publishers to market sell connect and optimize their games globally from payment solution to a full suit of tools designed to grow your game's Revenue while fostering a lawyer player base exola is your game's gateway to worldwide success with exola the world is your playground visit exa.com today and find all the solutions that will help you to power your games into success everywhere the uh the PC console market like one of the elements in the report was Market concentration on PC and console and this is something that I think the mobile Publishers don't or Overlook or kind of think that they have some kind of a competitive Advantage where they can come in and not be influenced by these Market realities so again a lot of Market mobile Publishers are seeing PC as a potential growth uh

growth market and four facts from from from the uh from the reports are 90% of the new game revenues in 2023 was captured by just 43 titles so quite of a concentration 90% that's insane uh titles title sixy year old and over accounted for more than 60% of playtime from 2022 to 2023 so people are playing old old games and even that kind of concent like that people playing old games six years and older and the whole focus on the production values have to be higher that's the way we can win is is already countered by this fact um over 60% of playtime spent on new titles went to franchises with annual releases so the madens the fifas the Call of Duties uh that that you name it and then finally new titles this is the scariest new titles competed for 8% of the total play time in 2023 8% so it's like it's

like a fraction of everything is left to uh to to the new title so uh can you talk a little bit about like what is the success behind the top titles on on PC and especially PC but PC console yeah good one so I I guess if we well well you've got to break it down into those those segments again so uh looking at let's say titles that are six years and older the top five we named these in the in the in the report were uh fortnite Roblox League of Legends Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto 5 and I think uh one of the elements here is that there's a there's an element of of course like a first mover Advantage right so coming in and um being a live service game quite early on in in Live service games like as they were sort of the the sort of inception of L or Sor the um the beginning of live service games with in uh within PC console that that already helps right so you sort of

have incumbents um but these games have done a really good job of sort of executing on that live service model over time and they were able to do that also at a time um you know if you go back in time six years ago the market was I think a little bit more forgiving of a new live service game coming out and finding its feet in terms of its content Cadence the type of contents it releases the monetization models things like that like those have actually changed and now they're sort of becoming more cemented over time I think our n expectations have sort of changed in terms of uh what a new life service game should have uh but really all of these titles are are in some way shape or form a platform and they're they're they're titles where folks have uh deep networks and deep investment over time and I think it's really hard like the switching costs to get someone out of a a game like Grand Theft Auto or Roblox where they've got a whole network of friends they put a bunch of time into and and maybe money into uh you know

creating their and crafting their experience that's really really hard to get away from um and then in the case of fortnite and Roblox specifically you have that uh that user generated content side of things that uh I think is a bit of an X Factor and we're going to continue to see how that evolves over time so that's sort of the sixe plus titles a bit of my my thoughts on that um for new titles yeah you you mentioned already the annual recurring titles 60% of new title playtime and when we look at that a lot of these are deeply entrenched uh experiences as well um so what I mean by that is NBA 2K Madden eafc if you want these experiences that's the place you're going to go right there's not very many other places that you're going to go to get an MBA experience so as they release year in year out out um these hours are entrenched those audiences are going to

migrate over to the to the newest version of that and unless you are launching NBA 3K or something it's pretty hard to consider that audience as addressable audience for your new game or sorry the audience could be because they could overlap in terms of other games they play but those hours let's say those hours are heavily entrenched in that type of experience and there's lots of players out there who you know in any given console gener ation every year they buy the latest Call of Duty and then they buy the next NBA 2K game and then that's kind of it um in terms of the the the 8% which the daunting the daunting 8% um the top five titles that we listed here Diablo Hogwarts balers gate Elden ring and Starfield um interesting all five of these titles have one thing in common and they're all paid play um only Diablo can really be considered a live

service game the other four are are premium titles um the other thing that I would say about these games which is also unique is all of them are coming from Studios that have some kind of a legacy behind them starfields coming from Bethesda people know what to expect from a Bethesda game um Elden ring from software these guys have been making games since I think I was playing armored Core on the PlayStation 1 back in the day uh balers gate even uh that's laran this is the culmination of probably 20 odd years of uh developing this specific type of game with divinity original sin 2 uh coming just before it Hogwarts Legacy even that one came from Avalanche uh that studio uh if you're not familiar with it was previously owned by Disney they did Disney Infinity which was the toys to life game uh for for Disney and uh as far as I recall that was about a billion doll franchise

um or pillar of the business I think that also included the actual toys themselves but still very significant work used to working with IP Studio that's had hits in the past uh and then of course Diablo blizzard um you know very Legacy uh very great legacy of that studio as well so all of these studios are not really coming out of nowhere right so they are uh you're competing for this 8% but you're also competing for this 8% with these sort of Jugger knobs that that have existed in the industry for a very very long time and have been delivering high quality games for that entire duration so it takes a decade for an overnight success is that what you're saying you nailed it exactly just to summarizing what you said is like the with the titles that that already have like live titles it feels like they have locked the players with the progress that players have been experiencing for such a long time so you've account like you accumulate so much progress that that starting something from the beginning would be insane like why would you why would you want to play a similar

game when you've spent six or seven years in the previous one and I gotten that and then there's the other social graph that you most likely have developed by playing one of these games for for years so now you have to essentially migrate your whole social graph which is impossible and then finally it's the content like if you are launching today and no matter how big of a team you have you like you're competing against years years and years of content from gigantic size of the titles like like there's no way there there's absolutely no way and if you say hey but we've we have better production values it's like get out it's like now it even take now you're even less accessible because I need a higher level of a device to play and there's probably longer loading time it's more expensive for you to create content it's not about the production values that's that's what I'm kind of like again referring back to but yeah uh go ahead you were talking about the uh uh breaking in into into

the market you're talking about the remakes remasters and so forth oh well I think um I was just going to mention to your point about what you're competing with we have uh this one slide in there that the refers to fortnite and and what's happening within um within that within that ecosystem and you saw that um when from October to November if I'm getting my dates right um fortnite launched OG in November and they had by our account at least a 60% ma growth month over month insane which is coming from a very high base let's put it that way so so that's 60% growth of a lot uh and then in December they maintained the 60% growth and then they grew an additional 16% on top of that when they released uh Lego fortnite fortnite festival and rocket racing um

and then we did do some additional analysis and it looks like that has been sort of coming down over time but even when we looked uh when we looked last I think for the it was either the March or the February numbers it was still 15 20% or so above the October numbers and again so like like you were saying if you're launching a new game it really to some extent it doesn't matter like what you think you're competing against or what you think your unique offering is because you are also competing with that right and some of these events kind of Hoover everything up from the all of the attention from the industry all of the hours kind of get hoovered up into into these uh these types of events when they happen and now that was maybe a one-off but I think if you were to ask epic and you were to ask the fortnite guys they'd tell you like we you know we want to do that every quarter uh for sure right that's part of the Disney play that they have going on as well um yeah so I think that's that that does make it particularly challenging to to break in it's not to

say that it's impossible but it is hard yeah and it and it's interesting to see that that again kind of like referring to the the pal worlds and the the battle bits of the world it's like they've taken they've taken the uh the almost the area that has been left behind by the uh the incumbents yeah so the high level of accessibility um you know simple Graphics versus versus highle Graphics that allows them again to do many more things uh than than the uh than the incumbent titles it's just it's it's like almost like a taking a time machine and then figuring out what they are not doing of today like for example if if I play Call of Call of Duty today on Console even on the news mobile version it's so difficult like it is so incredibly difficult because the the players have been playing it for a long time and and um and and then again when they make something so much more accessible and it looks like simple and and cheap if you will and retro it it

kind of like uh brings a different audience and allows you to enjoy those type of games without uh getting highly competitive as it is with the uh with the existing um top titles so uh anyways um there were there was some of the stuff that that we were talking about oh something about the the market concentration is is is that why we're seeing so many remakes and remasters is that an easy way for for the companies to come in or is it like like why why why like why these remakes and remasters why why are we playing Starcraft 2 and Resident Evil 2 or whatnot like and Final Fantasy 15 like why why is this happening yeah well I think Final Fantasy is may be its own thing because uh it well it does have some sort of in Universe elements that that are shared across the final fantasies they they sort of attempt to re reinvent themselves every time they have a new uh iteration but to your point you know we have Resident Evil two Resident Evil 3 Resident Evil 4 like these are getting sort of re-released you had dead space

as well um The Last of Us uh part one and part two were both uh remade and I think a lot of that comes down to uh safe bets but two things I would say one um the the cynic and me would say that it's it's safe bets right you have a pre-existing IP you have a uh a fan base out there somewhere they might be a little bit older like myself a little more gray in their beard than when RES Evil 2 initially released um but there's there's people who are fans of that of that franchise and that IP that are out there but the second half and and maybe this is the the Kinder side of me would also say that you want to make these games available for newer audiences and especially if you're talking about let's say Resident Evil that that you know there is there is continuity in in these games and if Resident Evil 2 is uh well maybe it's not available or maybe like to to play on modern modern platforms or maybe it is available but you're still

playing you know the PlayStation one version of that game and you want to be able to experience it with modern production values um I think giving players the opportunity to either revisit that title or just get into that title for the first time is actually hugely beneficial I I'm I'm kind of in favor of those types of remakes at least um just bringing things out of the past and bringing them forward and it kind of aligns with what you were saying about battle bit almost this going back to basic side of things right uh where um you're making a maybe a more a more sort of streamlined version of a game but it's still really really fun and and people still want to play it right um and going back to some of these older titles from from let's say earlier generations and making them available in a in a modern format can be great are these remakes and remasters finding the success like I've I've played I think I've only played the Starcraft remaster and um I did not enjoy it at all like the the usability was like yes the graphics improved but the usability was just so bad compared to what what

you're expecting right now and so I kind of feel like like again I I can't speak of the other ones but just improving the production values doesn't fix the issues with this being an outdated product are the other games like fixing this and if they're not like are are they kind of um going to the same well until it's empty because people just will be like hey I'm I'm not going to play this game if the graphics are just better because it's just not usable it's not it's not as good the user experience is horrific compared to the modern ones I think you hit the nail on the head and it runs the whole gamut so um unfortunately you Warcraft 3 is another example of this where I think people were very upset with what what happened with that title specifically um it was initially released I think they got rid of a lot of support for various mods and things like that I think they even discontinued the original version of the game so you couldn't even kind of go back and purchase that um so but but it did have better

graphics right so I think people were're not particularly happy with with how that one went um in the case of let's say what capcom's been up to and what I think you're seeing more of now is that just slapping new graphics on something is not enough people do expect a little bit of um there needs to be modernization in the design principles as well because you know a PlayStation the PlayStation game like the oldfashioned sort of tank controls and things like that we've come a long way from from there to Now sort of over the shoulder third person camera view which just makes everything significantly easier so there is an expectation of that um yeah I think a great example of this actually going back to Final Fantasy I Lov Final Fantasy 7 when I was much much younger and uh the Remake that came out a few years ago and they've just released a new version um or the second part of that recently completely imagined the whole combat system to make it significantly more Dynamic more

fast-paced more um action oriented but they also kept an option where you can sort of toggle it back to the original version so you get to kind of choose your experience which I thought was a really interesting way to approach that so for those folks who maybe don't have the Nostalgia don't want to visit like an old school turnbas RPG experience there's this wholly new redesigned uh combat system for you to have fun with an explore and for those people who do want that old school uh version of the game that's also there for you so they're really kind of trying their best to cater to fans uh and meet them wherever they are in terms of expectations so I think I think some of these games are in fact finding a great deal of su success but there's there's a t there's like you said going back to the well there's sort of a limit to that right you can only remake Resident Evil 2 um you know maybe once every 20 years or something don't know uh so at a certain point you do need to continue on with uh innovation in other

ways uh and final one about the uh the market concentration some of the things we're seeing as as everything is going to these existing uh incumbent uh titles and and and um and franchises uh trans medium so what's what's the uh does it really have the power to re-engage fans and and to boost engagement across entire catalog or is it more like a lightning in a in a I don't know I don't know how to say like a flash in a pen I get I get what you're saying I would say the jury is still out and I would also say that it is highly dependent on execution in a lot of ways um so looking at the study that we saw or or that we put out the release date like the actual release of a trans media IP had on average a 35% uptick in engagement but

that's the average so you did have significantly higher engagement from some IP and you did have actually negative engagement from others um now it's also worth mentioning that this is a very difficult thing to measure because this doesn't happen in a vacuum uh for example if you release whatever your trans media IP is um I don't know your Castlevania C drops on on Netflix on the same day that Elden Ring released well that sucks because Elden ring is probably going to swallow a lot of the engagement that you might have expected in your underlying game IP um so I think that that part makes it hard to to really know and I think the other piece that we are still waiting on is um when you look at a lot of these games that we've measured for let's say the last of us we've put out some numbers in terms of ma growth to 35% so on so forth um but these games

don't necessarily measure themselves by Ma right like this is a premium title so you're looking at lifetime sales that's more important and we do have some numbers on that um we can do some deep diving into that um if but either way I think the main thing that we are waiting for and that we haven't really seen yet is what happens next okay so we released The Last of Us on HBO we're going to release the Last of Us season 2 on HBO again sometime soon but I want to know what happens with The Last of Us Part three the game sales that's the piece that will be sort of more telling I want to know what happens with The Witcher 4 and unfortunately those titles are not really out yet and so in that regard it is quite challenging to know did this expand VIP like are you going to have way more sales of the next iteration of one of these uh franchises or is it going to be sort of a continuation of what you already had and then the HBO series is you know

maybe it's expanding uh IP in terms of Mind share and maybe it's expand but but other than that it has to be successful in its own right um to justify its own existence and that that's the piece that I think is Still Remains to be seen I would say jues out on that part yeah so pretty expensive uh investment without clear um clear benefit if you will I yeah I would say if you're going to take one of these undertake one of these Endeavors I would it has to justify itself to some extent right like it has to also be able to break even or or be a revenue driver as well otherwise like you said it's a massive risk uh in ter in terms of the Financial Risk but there's also a risk that if you if you kind of bomb your trans media IP like that actually could have a negative impact on your underlying game IP as well right people will draw that Association so ideally you want to have if you're to execute on one of these things you need to execute well in order to elevate the overall perception of the

IP like I think regardless of what you say about whether or not hbos the last of us uh is going to tie into um game sales in a meaningful way in the future um I I would suggest that the overall perception of that IP is is elevated by the HBO series at the very least right so has hasn't sort of Tanked it I would say yeah yeah 100% it like I mean having a great movie or a great TV show is is net positive uh but what you're saying is that it's a considerable investment takes significant amount of time you need to have specific resources for that of course Sony has I mean Sony Pictures AB start there uh but if you're are anything smaller than that uh then then um then you might need to acquire new resources new new uh new capabilities Angry Birds I remember uh benefited significantly from the first movie sure but then the second movie tanked and um and there were Financial repercussions

of that investment of course so um so so there are these elements at play and the benefit of that is not as clear it's it's hard to calculate into your your your future predictions so you have to essentially put it as an investment into an IP and make it um at least Break Even already in that investment that the sales of whatever trans media will be covering the uh the production cost and then potentially it's going to be so good that it's going to elevate the uh the rest of the portfolio yeah yeah absolutely uh one of the interesting part about the um we briefly talked about about the report is the decreasing play time so average quarterly play time has decreased uh by 26% since 2021 but that was lockdown time corre um is this across all titles or is it with top titles or is it with the bottom not bottom but anything else but the top titles like where is the decrease more

significant and where is it less that's a really good question and I'll be honest we didn't go that much deeper for like the year-over-year analysis of where the actual to like net net numbers are coming from um what I can say though is we did some and this is not in the report we did some early analysis on Revenue per hour as a uh as a metric to just sort of understand how this has changed over time and it does look like Revenue per hour has gone up no um which does indicate naturally yeah it indicates that a lot of these hours that have sort of left the industry were not associated with high spend um so you know were they free to play hours I think that could be fair to say but I do think it was large kind of a cut across the top I would say probably the you know free to play would have been a big

part that's hit from that and I we do have some analysis as well not in the report and a shout out to my my colleague Michael for shooting this over to me very uh very recently that showed about as a relative share free to play in 2021 was around I think 42% of overall Play Time 45% in 2022 and then back down to 42% % in 2023 um which again so that's the relative share of total play time so if it stayed kind of more or less static across those three years but overall play time has shrunk then I think it's fair to assume that to some extent freeo play but also the rest of games were kind of all shrunk fairly consistently yeah got it and uh on on mobile side when we're discussing the uh the lack of growth of of let's say consumers time um

playing games uh we kind of see two things really affecting that number one is rekindling with the outdoor activities post lockdown so that means spending more time on travel Fitness restaurants everything that you weren't able to do uh and again we're comparing this to 2021 and then the second part uh that is even more significant of a trend is the competition for media consumption that has really intensified with people spending so much more time on social media platforms streaming services Etc that it takes away from games because they are on different device uh so sorry they're on the same device but do you see this type of effect potentially happening on PC and console like like our users because essenti that's a different device you I mean I can I can choose whether I'm streaming something on my phone or whether I'm playing but on a on a PC I can do both yeah that's true but it is it can

be tough to do both at the same time although I do know a lot of people who will have uh you know either a podcast or something kind up on one screen while they're playing on another yes exactly uh but I would say um I do think it's fair to say that that those are those are most likely where these hours are going um like you said when lockdown was sort of repealed um people people went outside and touched grass again so that was a very immediate effect uh but beyond that we are just at in a sense Peak content right there's more games than ever and it's very easy to kind of get lost when looking just in the games microcosm but the there's more content than ever in general right and a lot of really really high quality content right like TV or like the the shows that are being put out the series amazing right it's it's incredible the YouTube content I mean I've been you know I go there off and on again and sometimes I'm just blown away by what these people are putting together uh and

putting out there on YouTube um and then you know not even talking about something like Tik Tok Instagram all these other things that are also claiming time and I think that's also just to drive the point home that is why we wanted to look at this from an hour's perspective because typically we are talking in an Mau perspective but an MA is not a mutually exclusive unit in the sense that I can appear as an MA in multiple different games in any given month but at least the hour that I have spent in one game I'm probably not playing two games at the same time I I know very few people who could play two games at the same time so that hour is sort of mutually exclusive and then when you think about it in those terms the content that you're just describing it's still all competing for the same hours and there's a limitation to how much you can sort of overlap your movie watching with your game watching uh at the same time right yeah yeah yeah definitely uh that that could be it like on on a mobile of course the other Tik toks and the Instagrams and the snaps and and the YouTubes might be the ones that are in

direct competition with mobile games but on PC or or console especially I would say that since you're using the same device that you usually stream from it's so much easier to be like you know what I'm just going to continue with Shogun CU that's you know that's a show that I need to watch or uh Yellowstone or whatever is going on these are these are amazing at least these are the shows that I'm watching but you know looking at um it's uh versus you know am I going to dive in this game it's like really difficult how many hours do I have left like some games are hard to quit but some games are just so intense and take so much time then you're like you know what I'm just going to chill for for uh for 30 to 60 minutes and not engage like in in a 60 Minutes I won't get that far in this game or I won't earn that much so so it it feels like that to two points there one is to your point you've also got to even make the decision to walk over to your computer and be on that device in the first place so it's not even necessarily about whatever is competing for you on your computer

screen you have to you have to opt to go there and sit down um and then in the second point I think uh one of the great advantages of video games that we always tout uh is is that it is an interactive and engaging form of entertainment uniquely so and and that is a massive advantage and it's wonderful thing but it can also be a bit of a double-edged sort like as a as a father myself like sometimes I come home from work I fed my child I did my whole thing and I sit down and I'm like no I don't want to engage I don't want to interact I want to turn off and I want to just be like fed content for for an hour before I you know cry myself to sleep and do it again tomorrow so that's also you know an element of this yeah yeah and um like we're talking negatively about games but there but I I do have to say that I get hooked as anybody in this business I get hooked so badly on on any of these games especially for me it's the strategy games and they take so much more time

and I'm also kind of like scary to start something I I'll be honest I'm I'm scary to uh to to to engage and if I play something I might play a puzzle game actually you know because I'm not not going to go crazy on on the latest pzz I'm just going to enjoy myself a little bit and and just chill or even play an iPad game but but it feels like if I if I open up a total I love Total War Games if I open up that or civilization it will be that one more turn type of a thing and it's going to be 1:00 a.m. by the time I finish or just you know force myself to to disengage from from The Experience so so there's that as well where the games have become so engaging that you're you know if you have any responsibilities in your life you're almost afraid to even start yeah 100% And you want to you want to throw yourself some softballs instead of getting into into the hard stuff and not only that um to your point about getting engaged like there's the problem with being sort of up until 1:00 a.m. but there's also the side that like if you're halfway through a good story in a game or maybe you're halfway through a

good campaign or something like that um you may pause it or and come back to it later but there's still this sort of like open thread in your mind where you're like oh but I really need to go back and close that you got to get to the next chapter I got to finish that campaign I got to do whatever and yeah that element also there is a sort of mental um an ongoing mental toll there of like an open browser in your brain sort of that's why I feel these type of games like especially with Shooters the extraction shooters or Battle Royale like these are sort of a games where you can have a clear start and end to a session yeah uh where it's easier to disengage and easier to take them in pieces rather than something that is just continues and uh whether it's an RPG or uh or playing Uncharted or or any of these type of titles that you kind of like need to finish but it's like a it's like finishing a TV show so so it's um it's a different type of an experience um all right let's close this down by talking about some high level predictions like like what do you see happening in the market for the next year or two like what are the sort of

opportunities the macro Trends the markets like what would you be um what would you be looking at sure well in terms of uh in terms of growth we still can consider that that's going to come from the console side of the market um again this is outlined in the report we we expect that uh or let's say historically as you get to the more mature phase of the cons cons Market you'll hit Peak install base and you will reach the sort of Maximum component of NextGen content in the library for the for those uh for the console generation and that typically coincides with a higher degree of spending for uh uh for that time frame so that that's that's sort of the prediction for the next three years that console will be one of the main drivers of growth for that reason on top of that you also have uh at some point uh a new Nintendo

device coming out um now again Nintendo's very strong on its first party uh software but even still it is a source of growth and can be an inflection point in a new opportunity uh for new types of games as well so I think those are those are a couple um in terms of what's going to keep on happening I I mean when we look at this year I I expect to see more of the battle bit and Hell divers 2 type breakout successes because there is less of a release slate of AAA titles so I think that will give some breathing room for these other titles that sort of cater to a specific Niche the opportunity to um to kind of grow and to to uh uh to take a piece of of market share um and then having said that I do I do expect that we will continue to see a right sizing of the market like I

don't think that goes away in a month or two you know I think this is something just looking at other Industries we talked a little bit about this uh at GDC this is something that will likely have a period of time before it completely washes uh or washes through the system so I I do I do sort of expect that that will kind of continue to happen which is unfortunate but uh likely the reality that we're in yeah so right yeah I I agree and especially with the with the advancements in the AI that we're seeing so the tech and tools and and will will just keep on improving and and companies will just focus more strongly on profitability so they're more likely to start using these tools start experimenting and probably we're going to see also a lot of um a lot of work going for um co-development Consulting all these kind of stuff that that uh that pushes the need for uh for large um head counts and whatever is not the core

competence of the studio or the company is going to be uh is going to be pushed to uh to a vendors or or third parties yeah I think that's a very fair assessment yeah interesting so industry is reshaping um becoming becoming uh much more durable for for the lean times ahead yep I would I would agree with that that it's remolding itself around the uh the new Norm as we mentioned at the beginning yeah damn all right well Ben thank you so much for for jumping on the podcast discussing uh the market trends was pleasure to have you and what's what's the what's the best way to get in contact with you if somebody wants you to uh you and your team to come over and and read the the presentation that the research teams have done no I'm just kidding to provide your services yeah absolutely absolutely uh you can find me on LinkedIn uh just Ben Porter I'm the only Ben Porter working

in newu and uh you can also uh send me an email ben. porter.com uh that's a good way to get a hold of me uh if you're already a client you can uh reach out to your client success manager or account manager hopefully you know who that is um and they'll they'll be happy to arrange something where myself or or maybe even Tom In the Flesh can come and and read the report out and have this kind of conversation with you and your team yeah we we had actually newu uh come in on our investor Summit in Istanbul about a month or so ago so it was really really interesting and and especially with our audience a lot of people are very or a lot of Founders and executives are very much focused on mobile but I've never seen so many questions being asked from a from a person from your team uh and um he was he was swarmed so so highly recommend uh getting newu uh on site to to discuss discuss the the gaming Market overall so

you guys have a very interesting uh set of data and um and you're very opinionated normally so that makes into a good conversation nice thank you very much for the kind words all right thank you everybody for listening connect with newo get the latest report Link in the uh the description so on that catch you guys later bye for now