The state of video games with Matthew Ball – Part One

This week, Circana predicts another year of growth for the US video game market. Steam Deck OLED is suffering stock shortages due to the DRAM and ongoing storage crisis, and we speak to video game analyst extraordinaire Matthew Ball about the state and the future of the video game industry.
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Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. It's a big episode this week because we have done a big, big, big, big interview with Matthew Ball about his latest essential report the state of video gaming in 2026. The interview was so big we've actually split it into two halves. So, part one is today, and we'll have part two for you this time next week. But, before we get to that conversation with Matthew, let's look at the some of the key stories of the last week, shall we? Now, we didn't do our typical episode last Thursday for all sorts of reasons. So, there's quite a lot of stories we haven't covered, you haven't heard on this show. You know, Sony had a State of Play last week where they announced a load of cool games including two God of War projects, a John Wick game, the Korean game project

Windless, a sequel to Kena: Bridge of Spirits called Kena: Scars of Cosmera, a new Castlevania game which is exciting for fans of that, and new trailers for Resident Evil, Control, Marathon, 007, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Pragmata, Saras. There was lots and lots of stuff. New stuff, big stuff, AAA stuff, indie stuff, all sorts of stuff. Um that was last week. Also last week, Riot Games had announced it was downsizing the development team behind its League of Legends fighting game 2 XKO. The game just hasn't hit the numbers the company needed uh in order to keep a big team on it. Around 80 be reallocated roles or or they'll be made redundant. Also last week, the CEO of Supercell criticized the lack of radical innovation in Western mobile games. He said the mobile industry was coasting in a uh in a blog post that he did around the company's financials. We'll be talking to Matthew Ball later on about that exact thing. Um Remedy has a new CEO called Jean-Charles Goasdoué. Hopefully I got that right. He is a specialist in Asian markets and live service games. He's been at EA, been at CCP. Um it might not seem an

obvious fit for Remedy who makes single player stories games, but he has a lot of experience, so that's it's quite exciting for them. Sega had to write down $200 million as Rovio has been underperforming, hasn't been delivering the numbers it was expecting when it bought it. In particular, they had a Sonic game out called Sonic Rumble. Didn't do very well, struggled to find an audience when it launched at the end of last year. Uh a game that did do well, Arc Raiders, uh that hit 14 million copies worldwide and nearly had 1 million concurrent players last month. That game has just done incredible things uh since it launched. Also last week, Ubisoft had some rare good news. Um they had some financials that were a bit better than expected for the sort of end of year quarter. That was helped by Assassin's Creed. Ubisoft also had some bad news where either 538 employees or 1,200 employees, uh depending on who you believe, went on strike over the company's reset plans. Those plans involve layoffs and and game cancellations and staff having to come into the office 5 days a week. Unions aren't happy about it, particularly in France. And uh they went on strike last week for 3 days.

Other news Australia from that week, Australia was concerned about Roblox as it increases its scrutiny around child safety, not just on Roblox but across um social media as well. And there was lots of news basically. Um I'm not going to dive into those so much cuz those stories are a week old. If you do want my take on them, we do do something called the Game Business Micro. Comes out on a Monday and it it is for paid subscribers. I know most of you aren't paid subscribers, but I think it's really useful show. I go through the news. I I might give a bit of an opinion on it. I try to. I try to add some extra context to that news. And if you're thinking, "Hey, you know, that sounds interesting and I like the Game Business. I'd like to keep it going and keep it funded." Why not give us a subscribe, a paid subscription anyway. It'd be nice to have you amongst our paid subscribers. Anyway, there is one story from the previous week that I am going to bring back up and that is the one around High Guard. So, last week High Guard developers Wildlight laid off a huge proportion of its team after the live service shooter, the online free-to-play shooter, failed

to hit the numbers it needed. Now, I'm a bit sad having to keep talking about this cuz I think the team, frankly, has been through enough. But, I'll recap it, right? So, if you should have known the story by now, everyone's been talking about it. Wildlight is the studio it formed 4 years ago by former Respawn staff that worked on Apex Legends. It had around 100 employees. Now, High Guard was the closing reveal of The Game Awards last December. It generated a significant amount of online attention, most of it negative. Um people didn't seem to like that it existed, didn't seem to like that it was the closing game. It felt grossly over exaggerated. Its release was review bombed by players, although the general reception has been that the game isn't quite right. It didn't quite deliver the experience that was necessary to really retain players. Um you know, it still did have 1.54 million monthly active players in January despite only being on sale for a few days. It was number eight in terms of most played games in January. Again, not too bad. Now, there's a few conversations that people have, that everyone's got an opinion on this. But, the reason why I'm

bringing this story back up is because yesterday a story broke that Wildlight was funded by Tencent. Um it received Tencent backing at the start. Now, if you're a regular listener or reader of The Game Business, you might be thinking, "Hang on, didn't I already know that?" Yes, you probably did cuz I knew that and I've not been keeping that a secret. I didn't realize it was a secret. I'm not entirely sure it was a secret. A lot of gamers are understandably oblivious to how game funding works. You can't You wouldn't expect them to know these things. They probably see an independent team and they don't ask themselves, "Hey, how does a 100-person team full of industry veterans make a game in 4 years and not go bankrupt?" Obviously, for those that don't know, and I know lots of all the readers and listeners of the show will know this, studios of all different sizes get their funding from somewhere, whether that's a bank or a friend or an angel investor or family or a VC or a big organization like Tencent, like Savvy, like Embracer back in the day. Whoever. There were lots and lots and lots of studios that have taken Tencent money. Some Some of them have been public and some of them have not been public. I didn't really see this as a story. To be clear, where the money comes from, who's funding these things,

is interesting and I do report on that from time to time. So, I'm always interested in that. Um and I often ask the question if it's a new studio, where did the money come from? But the fact that Tencent backed a live service project by former Apex Legends developers, I mean, it's not even barely even a story. Tencent didn't own the studio, they didn't publish the game. Maybe they Hey, maybe they should have done. Maybe the story would have been different, but um it obviously caused a lot of controversy online because apparently it means the studio wasn't really independent and there's all sorts of conspiracy theories around it. But ultimately it's become another stick to beat the Wildlight team with. With a former employee of Wildlight lash out at players partly blaming for the fact them for the failure of the game. Uh I'm not sure that's entirely true. I mean, High Guard uh from what I understand from the people who have played it and given it a chance, that just isn't quite right there. You know, a bit more time might have solved it, a few tweaks, a few changes here there. But clearly the studio is running out of time to make those changes and and has had to has had to make these cuts as a result of that. Um I do get where that frustration comes

from. I think not being interested in live service shooters fine. I wasn't that interested in the game either. But to really hate on it, to almost will it into failure, to review bomb it on Steam, I just was it was just cruel. I I The latest thing about Tencent feels just like another thing to continue that cruelty, frankly. There are obviously lots of lessons to learn about this game. It didn't do any public playtesting. Um there may have been financial logistical reasons why that they didn't do that. But I think if you're doing a live service shooter in today's market, you kind of have to That has to be part of the plan. I think there are lessons around how you announce and launch live service games in the skeptical sort of marketplace. Um the Game Awards gave High Guard the attention it wouldn't normally have got. Maybe it wouldn't have got the players it got, the 1.5 more of a million. They wouldn't have got those players if it wasn't for the game awards, but it also had a lot of negativity and a lot of hate. I think if you're going to do an announcement event like the game awards, you've got to have the game ready for the game awards, I think. I think it's telling that Sony announced its online Horizon game via PlayStation blog post last month, last week, sorry, and didn't put it in

their State of Play showcase. That was very interesting. They obviously know unless you've got something to show people, people are going to be quite skeptical of these things. But look, I think the team and the game have been through enough. I don't think it has painted our audience in a good light at all. And if anyone from the Wild Hunt team is listening, I hope you're okay. I The game isn't that bad. It definitely doesn't warrant this kind of anger and hate. It's It is absurd, frankly. Right, next story. This is sort of positive. It is positive. What am I talking about? It is a positive story. So, Circana, they're the US data firm. You must know them. They track all the game sales. We've had them on the show a few times. They expect the US market to grow 3% in 2026 to $62.8 billion. To give you a point of comparison, Circana last year reported that the US market grew 1.4%. So, it's It's a big step up in growth. Now, the reason why they think about this growth, well, part of it is Nintendo Switch 2. They're They're quite bullish about it. Nintendo Switch 2 was the fastest-selling games console in history last year. It'll have a full year on the

market this year in the US, and they've got some big games coming on the horizon, hopefully. We don't know all of its Nintendo slate for this year. But of course, the big thing as well is Grand Theft Auto 6, which is due on November 19th. It will be the biggest entertainment launch of all time. Hopefully, that'll drive hardware adoption as well on PlayStation, at least probably Xbox as well. It's coming out just before Black Friday. That's quite an exciting opportunity. Circana also calls out some other games, Resident Evil Requiem, which is out this month. That's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of hype, a lot of excitement. Marvel's Wolverine, which is a big PS5 game. And Pokémon Poképia. I'm really interested in Poképia. The game received a lot of very positive previews last week. The game mixes sort of Minecraft, Pokémon, Animal Crossing together, which really sounds like a potent mix. Resident Evil, we've been, you know, we know that's a big game. Um well, the Wolverine knows big game, but Pokémon, I think it might be a surprise one for us. Uh I don't know. It could be the killer app that uh that Switch 2 will have for the first half of the year, maybe. Be interesting. Sakana also thinks that subscription could be a very positive thing for the market, which has seen

growth out last year, good growth last year across subscription services. Although, as we'll get to with Matthew Ball, growth in subscription services isn't necessarily a good thing for the wider industry, and we'll come back to that. Uh now, Matt Piscatella in this sort of prediction, he's one of our regular guests, of course. He predicts that 2026 will be a hell of a ride, and one of the key concerns he points to is the rising prices of obviously RAM and storage, which has been caused by these AI data centers demanding all of these RAM, which uh has all been bought up, and it's causing a huge spike in the cost of these things. I mean, it could really impact pricing, and not just on hardware, you know, some of the companies, PlayStation, Nintendo, might decide to increase the price of their services and their games, as well. It's I think it's a big threat. I'm actually a bit concerned about it. And it connects to our next story, which is um the Steam Deck OLED. Um it may be according to Valve, it may be intermittently unavailable in selected regions due to the ongoing RAM and storage shortages. The hardware is already out of stock in the US and Japan. We've already seen Steam stop selling the lower variants of the Steam

Deck. Steam has also delayed announcing the pricing and release details for Steam Machine, Steam Frame, that's the VR headset, and the Steam Controller because of all of this. It's not the only thing. We've had Bloomberg report that Sony might not launch PS6 until 2028 or 2029 because of these sort of component shortages. Personally, I think there's no need for a PS6 next year, regardless of the cost challenges. I think we're still feels like we're still really early in this generation. I don't think there's that much demand for more PlayStation hardware, but even so, it looks like 2028 or 2029 according to Bloomberg. Uh Bloomberg also reports that Switch 2 may rise in price. I mean, I think Nintendo might do that or might be forced might raise prices in other areas like Nintendo Switch online to compensate for what's happening, you know, with this RAM crisis. I actually find this whole situation quite frightening. I hope it does go away, but like the Trump tariffs last year, it feels somewhat existential. I will, of course, stay on top of all of this and goings-on in the space and how um like the PlayStation, Nintendo, and to a lesser extent, Xbox react to it all. Um that's kind of it for the news

segment this week. If you like this sort of news roundup and analysis, I do recommend becoming a paid subscriber. I do this every sort of thing every week um on a Monday morning. It's called the Game Business Micro. And subscribers also get a monthly report from us. Our next monthly report comes out next week. And you also get the ability to come to our Game Business Live event at no extra cost. That's going to be in LA in June. And we'll be looking into doing more at live events as well around the world. Um subscribers get access to that. So, do consider becoming a paid subscriber. But, that's it for the news today. Um but there was one big industry development last week. You can Matthew Ball released his latest essential report to the state of video gaming in 2026. This year, he asked the question if the industry is at an all-time high, and it is, how come most the industry is still suffering? He looks deeply at where this extra money, this growth, is going. And the answer is not into many publisher and developer pockets. I spoke to Matthew just earlier, and it was a chunky interview. So much so that we're going to do this in two parts. Today,

Matthew and I will talk about his report, China, Roblox, the drop in funding, making PC and console games for mobile phones, older gamers, the state of consoles generally, and growing audiences in new territories. So, without much further ado, here is my conversation with Matthew. Hello, Matthew. Welcome Welcome back to the show.
Glad to be here.
How was this year's report for you to do? I do I do love to fact that each one tells a sort of tells a tells a story from a different angle and it's not just the previous year's report with with new numbers. I do like the fact that you you do that. How was it today?
This one was a lot harder and a lot trickier because it was mostly a process of discovering. I think if we take a step back the report that I wrote at the start of 2024 was organized around a fundamental premise, which is why haven't we returned to growth yet? And how do we disabuse the common explanations? We go back two or three years, we heard a bunch of different explanations. There was a COVID

pullback, there was the implementation of IDFA, there were hardware shortages, there was the shift to hybrid work, which led to many different titles being delayed and the general sense that 2021 and 2022 had relatively weaker slates than the market had typically seen and therefore the softness in consumer spending was a response to that. And so the 2024 essay was partly working through yes, each of those concerns were significant, they were material, but they've mostly been digested or they're no longer sufficient to explain three years of stagnation. And indeed when you look at other industries, books, digital video, traditional video, music, they had all returned to growth.
Mhm.
And in fact it's kind of remarkable that you consider that post-pandemic books have gone up and yet [snorts] video games had not. 2025's report looked at some of those same themes, but it tried to take a look at some of the more underlying tensions. The fact that we had three horizontal years of revenues didn't itself explain why we

had such severe layoffs. Of course, making no more money than before doesn't explain why profits had hemorrhaged, doesn't mean layoffs had to uptick. And so that 2025 report was taking a look at some of the underlying tensions in the industry, some of which related to long growing cost increases, others related to stagnation in the console sales base, and another just took a look at the concentration of time in free-to-play. When I started this record last summer, the goal was not to add one more year to all of the long-running trends. There's insight in doing that, but I don't think that there's much action. The goal of this report was really to answer a different question. You know, 2025, the industry had its third consecutive year of growth. 2025 will now be five percentage points higher than the 2021 high. That's roughly worth $10 billion in consumer spend. My question was, if we had those three years, if we had a new all-time high,

and if that all-time high was shared across all three core segments of the market, mobile, PC, console, why don't things seem to be getting better? Where is the money actually going? Because it does not seem to be going to developers, publishers, or new games. Answering that question was a lot trickier than the preceding two.
Yeah, well, you did a good job of of just doing that. I mean, I mean, it was a tough read, I have to say, in terms of um I think there's about a I don't know, 120 slides of feeling slightly depressed. Um but um but it was um
Not not quite so many, but
you basically a few slides in and you start talking about where the key industry issues are at the moment. Um and it's interesting I'll I'll sort of go through a few of them cuz I think you talked about one of the things you talked about was the drop in funding for new games and and studios and sort of major companies, major publishers whittling down their portfolios and cutting games from their lineup. Both of which obviously have been happening before 2025 and then continued into 2025. And I've talked about this before. And the argument I keep getting thrown at me about about this is that,

you know, this is fine, you know, we've had too many games as it is. A lot of them are doing similar things for similar audiences. Frankly, although bad from a job's perspective, this is necessary. But I'm interested to know your thoughts on that. I know it's slightly different from what you're talking about in the report, but do you think that that it's been necessary this funding cut? But is it a good thing?
I think it First and foremost helps to recontextualize that funding cut. What you're talking about right now is the decline in private equity and venture capital funding for content. We're not talking about games, tech, and tools, and services. We're talking about the money that goes to publishers to fund studios or to studios directly. That sum is down, I think, 85% since the highs in 2021, but critically it's below 2019. That's critical because revenues are up 30 to 40% and so we have less money coming in and then in parallel the costs of development per person because of inflation have gone up. So even though we're talking about being roughly 2019-2018 levels, on an adjusted to revenue basis or an adjusted to

personnel cost, we're probably approaching a decade-long low in venture funding into game studios. As I started this report again last summer, one of the ways in which I started was to take a look at what I expected was going to happen in 2025 and what many expected was going to happen in 2025. And if you go review the the consensus was that venture capital funding was going to turn around this year or this last year and it didn't. And so is that necessary? I think that's a hard question to answer because it has a value judgment associated. When I talk to investors and I know that Owen talked about this with you a few months ago, the reality is that as an asset class, video games are small. 200 billion is both a lot and relatively trivial. It also has a fundamental mismatch, which is the period of investment. Even if that's three, four, or five years, suddenly gets to six or seven.
Yeah.
The challenge with the venture capital community investing in video games is that they are used to increasing their risk appetite or the checks that they

write over time as there's evidence of success. You and I start a SaaS technology company, we may not have material revenues relative to the money that we raise, but we might have 100 customers, then 1,000, then 10,000. We see churn, we see pricing, we see utilization. The challenge with games is UAT and QA, vertical slices, everything that you can do along the way. As we've seen in the last few months with major game releases, can tell you ways to modulate the games, but they aren't evidence of product market fit from an investor who says, "I put 10 to work, now should I put 40?" And so, it's just not clear that this is an effective fit for the category when you parallel that with the fact that the last few years have had essentially no true venture-backed successes defined by venture-level outcomes. Save for the tranche basically 2018 to 2020 2021, it's explicable that venture

capital has accrued.
Yeah. My concern is the impact this has on I know that, you know, there's a lot of games and perhaps we don't need as many triple-A projects or live service games. I think if you read Ilkka's Supercell CEO's blog um the other day,
Of course, yeah.
he accused the mobile market and particularly he talked about the Western mobile market. I think he said it was it was coasting was his words. And he said, you know, there's not had a I've got it here. We have not had radical new gameplay innovation to the market, not in the way Clash Royale, Pokémon Go, or Brawl Stars each did in their time. And his point was that, you know, for the mobile industry to grow, you need new players, new innovations, which you get through innovation and genres and new ways to play and all that kind of stuff. And I don't think this is a mobile thing. I think this is a I think this goes across all the different segments of the video game industry. You can apply that argument. Interestingly, your report really drove this home for me because you look at what TikTok has done in terms of, you know, whether it's driving innovation or inspiring innovation in sort of the linear screen industries or, you know, what OnlyFans has done in in pornography or AI in in social, which, you know, I'm not seeing anything like that really happening in

[clears throat] games, Roblox maybe. And I do wonder where that thing might come from if we're not getting that investment level. I appreciate we might have a lot of games, but it's that's the bit that I'm not I'm not worried about this. It's the quantity of games. I'm I'm wondering if the industry needs something like Ilkka's talking about that we could that could actually inspire a bit of an attention economy fight back effectively. I realize I didn't ask a question there. That's just my my anxiety around the investment.
No, you did. It's all in thread. So, for the audience, it's helpful to talk about the extent to which the industry is transformed to your private funding for early and mid-stage game studios is one aspect. But, [clears throat] of course, as part of that, we have seen an unprecedented number of game cancellations, studio closures, we see budgetary reductions. We are now at a point which a record high of total content investment is going to external development partners. I don't mean that as an indictment, but typically when we think of where are the new creative ideas happening, the assumption and indeed the history tends

to be within the studio, not from external partners. And so, when we take a look at those five different vectors, in totality, the industry now spends less as a share of total net revenue on games than it has in every one of the last eight years with the exception of the pandemic. The pandemic's an outlier. Revenue grew way more in 2020 than anyone predicted. Your costs lagged because you just can't greenlight projects. And so, there's a reason why reinvestment as a share of revenue was at a low in 2020. If we normalize, the industry now invests less in new game development than they have in recorded history. That is in one sense a big problem. How are we going to find the new great hits? On the other side, we do see ample evidence of two or three critical things. Number one is we still see myriad other games coming out. Eugenics just came out. We see categories like Block Blast, which has I think 150 million monthly active users, tens of millions of daily active users, 300 or so million quarterly active users. Weird measure, but it's relevant

in South Korea. And so the whole point here is whether we're talking about brand new ideas, whether we're talking about Arc Raiders going after some of the industry stalwarts, or we're talking about someone just reinventing a Tetris spin-off, we definitely see new ideas coming into forefront, and it's not clear that the solve for more innovation would be more venture funding, more studio funding, a higher level of revenue reinvestment. It seems to be coming at the smaller scale, and that's positive. Do we need more of it? Certainly. Is that necessary to restore the industry to overall growth? Definitely. And when we take a look at one of the topics that I think we'll get into a little while, which is controversial though it may sound and horrible though I think it is, video gaming has been a loser in the attention wars of the last half decade. I think that's definitive. And if we say how do we remedy that, then yes, exactly the points that you and Ilkka are talking about is necessary.
Need to get good. To use a gaming uh He's a gaming term. Um let's talk about

console, shall we?
Sure.
I'm a bit obsessed with it cuz I I'm a console gamer, I think, and it and actually get gravitates towards it. I'm really fascinated when it comes to game revenue. We're actually quite a bit down still compared with the pandemic in terms of revenue, I think is what your report said. Um 3.7 billion down compared with 2020. 2025 was better than 2024 and 2022, but not 2023. Regardless, you can see why game publishers are quite vocally talking now about PC being a more viable platform for them. What is your view on this? Cuz particularly with these figures, Xbox scaling back as well, it it sort of focus on on on the platform, the hardware anyway. How do you see the direction to travel for console?
So, let's hit some of the numbers for the audience cuz I think it's helpful there.
Yeah.
So, if we go back to 2020, there was 41.1 billion that was spent by consumers on game content and services. That would be inclusive of package sales plus microtransactions, including services such as PlayStation Plus, Nintendo Switch online, Xbox Game Pass. So, 41.1 billion.

By 2022, that contracted down to 37.8 billion. So, about 3.5 billion was lost in annual recurring consumer spend. Last year, in 2025, there was a new high, 41.6 billion. So, it was a half billion dollars above 2020. Sounds positive. But, what have actually happened was a transformation in those revenues. In 2020, PlayStation Network was doing roughly 3.4 billion dollars per year in revenue. This year, it's going to be close to 5.1. So, we're talking about a 1.7 billion dollar increase in PlayStation Network revenue. But, the overall market grew only half a billion. That starts to illuminate the picture. Consumer spending went up, but where it's going has changed. Nintendo Switch online launched in 2018. It was basically irrelevant as a revenue contributor until the pandemic. Game Pass has grown enormously. And so, when we actually take a look at console and we recognize a downturn in

revenues and a repair over the last four years. But, then in parallel, a transformation of that revenue from actual game purchases and microtransactions, we see a substantial decline. In 2025, video gamers spent 30.5 billion on packaged games and MTX, down from 34.2. So, no, the industry didn't grow a half billion. It shrunk by 3.7 billion if you're a publisher trying to access those monies. Now, some portion of Game Pass revenues go outside of the Xbox Game Studios. But, we don't know what the discount is. Some of the PlayStation Network money is reallocated to their internal studios. But, this is the center piece of the whole war, which is saying, if the industry has had three back-to-back years of new all-time high, that sounds great. But, why does the revenue not seem to be hitting many people? And the answer is it's not really getting to the publisher and developer well. And PC has been a bright spot in the

industry. It never declined post-pandemic. It continued to grow. It has grown in each of the last 5 years since. However, the net decline in console has been so great that 4/5 of that net growth in PC is just offset. It's replacing the console substitution. And so that has a few different implications. Number one is Chris, you're right. People are looking beyond console, and I think that that's reasonable. We don't see the install base growing, and now we see the spend stagnating at best or reallocating to services at worst. And PC is a growth area, but pretty saturated. Everyone is struggling to figure out does the industry actually have enough appetite, defined by player time and player dollars, to support not just the volume of games, but even our internal expectations. And right now it's it's tough, but certainly if you're going to make a bet, it looks like PC, not console.
Yeah. Um sort of concerned about that, but then again, it's always you never know where the innovation's going to come from. And I

think that's what I think maybe this is what you you had growth engines as your thing last year, which I think is like where is the where's the industry's moment going to come from? And the slides that that were just like astonishing is when you go through all the other industries and what's happened there and the growth that we've seen through TikTok and, you know, AI and and even things like crypto and stuff, and you start wondering all of these things have had these amazing transformative moments in the last 5 years or maybe a bit longer in some cases. That's not really a question either, but I know that we were you you were talking about losing this attention war, and I'm looking to find out where the fight back is. And one of the first one of the big growth things the big drivers has been Roblox. But I think the thing with Roblox from my the thing with Roblox I I whenever I talk to companies about Roblox and I don't game publishers, it feels like they don't really know how to react to it. Like as if they see Roblox in the same way maybe the film and TV industry see YouTube, right? It's a threat. It's a It's It's It's an issue for them cuz it's competing for their people's time. But there's not really much they can do about it other than maybe lean into it from a marketing

opportunity. I know that you're a big follower of Roblox's performance. It is astonishing some of these numbers. It's on another level. And but it is it like cuz it has that YouTube element of it being a UGC platform. And it's difficult to know how the rest of the industry, those publishers that we're talking about really capitalize on it. Not question either.
No, but what you and I are doing right now is basically walking through those fundamental theses, which is it's not just where is the growth, but what of the growth can I as a developer, publisher, or investor separate from that fact do to access it? I mentioned a moment ago that actually nearly all the console growth has been in platform software and services. 40% of growth is in China, again essentially largely inaccessible to a foreign developer. And then when we take a look at non-China revenues in aggregate, but including those platform services, 70% of market growth outside of China last year went to Roblox. Now, I think it's important to separate some of that is cannibalization. As in did Roblox take some money, hours, and

players away from traditional games? Absolutely. I think it's impossible to imagine that Minecraft and Clash at all were not affected, but I think in general it is creating new revenue. Some of that will then return into the traditional system, but if you're looking and saying the industry is growing, why aren't I and what can I do about that? If you say 70% of the growth is going to Roblox, well, that's part of the answer. It's it isn't actually in that aggregate pool. I do think that there's a little bit more reason for positivity there. You mentioned it earlier as to where the innovation's coming from. The tycoon genre is not novel to Roblox, but when you take a look look Steel a Grain Rod, that
That general mechanic is definitely innovative. It's demonstrably sticky. Will it continue to permutate and gyrate into you know, what we used to call HD gaming? Probably. But yes, by and large, when you take a look at these game designs, how they monetize, how they stimulate, what they

reward, by that I don't necessarily mean uh financially, but just in terms of gameplay loops. It is tough to s- flex anything from a traditional system down there. You can do it, and there are some examples. The Sonic titles seem reasonably popular, but it's not clear that the strength doesn't really come from platform native opportunities, which by and large means that they're not accessible to most of the traditional developers.
And this is the thing you end with, and I've talked about on the show recently, which is the There isn't really one game industry. No, Roblox is clearly having an effect. And this I, you know, these There's overlaps. It's never as clear as this. Oh, you mentioned China. And obviously, how important that market has been to the overall growth of the industry, and how, you know, I think you said something like, you know, if you're going to really participate in the growth of the industry at the moment, you need to work out how to succeed in China. But then again, as you said a moment ago, you observed that the vast majority of game revenue made in China is from Chinese-made games, and now we're seeing those Chinese-made games taking a bigger share of the rest of the

global games industry as well. It's interesting, cuz I spoke to Patrick Söderlund last year. He's the um and, you know, CEO of Embark, our creators developer. And he talked to me about how they were like when they started up. How can we as a developer compete with what China's doing, what China's studios are doing? And his conclusion was they needed to rethink everything, the tools, the pipelines, everything. They needed to make stuff faster, and that's how you can keep up with these big, incredible Chinese game developers with their big live service projects. And I think, in a way, there's a bit of theme here in my mind, where there's an element of we sort of need to get We need to fight harder and and be smarter. And And I think seeing companies like that, those new studios that did form, okay, Embark's not that new, but finding new ways of doing things might might prove to be the crucial element that we're sort of unlocking when it comes to the West competing with China in a way. Uh I need to stop making statements. I should start putting questions in [laughter] my when I start talking.
They're good statements. I'm with you.
But um I thought it was fascinating still going back to consoles what you're talking about with China, you know, um I

think Niko Partners said that half a million Switch 2 consoles were sold in China last year. I don't I don't know how they were built, but it's based on their estimates. And it wasn't even officially sold in China. And I guess there's an element of PC and console growth there. Um I think you said it was up 22% um since 2022.
Sounds right.
Um I have to imagine there's a ceiling there though. I know China's a huge market that even having a small percentage of that market can be proved to be immensely lucrative, but what's your take on it?
It is it is hard to overstate how challenging China's strength has become to the global market.
Mhm.
There's really a few different factors there. One is what share of global growth is happening in China. If we look at the overall market, roughly 19% of all consumer spending occurs in China. But 38% of all global spending growth is in China. Now when you take a look at China of that market, 84% of it is going to Chinese made games. And I'm not talking about Chinese owned games, Riot is excluded, Supercell is excluded. Chinese developed games get

5/6 of all growth in China.
Mhm.
So we're starting by saying 40% of growth and 85% of that's going to Chinese developers. Of the remaining 16%, you have to do a domestic publishing deal, and those domestic publishers take as much as 70% or 90%. So by and large, all of that market is not available to you. But the strength of that domestic market has built some incredible companies, some incredible titles, and those get exported. You take a look at many of the most successful mobile titles globally,
Yeah.
Last War as one example, they tend to be from China. Block Blast comes from Hong Kong as well. And so, in parallel to most of the growth or more of the growth going to China and that being inaccessible to foreign publishers, China now has 14% of non-China revenues. That's up from 10.9% in '19. In the average year, that's about half a

percent to 1% of the non-China market goes incrementally to China. So, let's put that into perspective. I started the year by saying, "Where is the growth going?" Last year added 10 billion in consumer spend. Four of that was in China. Let's just assume that that's gone. 6 billion is left. Of that 6 billion, it's part of 150 billion, and China increased its share by 1%. 1% of 150 is 1.5. So, of that new six, only four and a half was incremental because China had devoured another one and a half.
Right.
From their mobile publishers, from Game Science and others. So, all of a sudden, it gets winnowed and winnowed and winnowed, leaving that four and a half. But as I just mentioned, PlayStation added something like 600 million PlayStation Network revenue last year. We know that Game Pass was up a half billion to a billion. And so, China sits within this much larger picture of success and being not just the

overall market driver, but now a non-domestic driver of Chinese revenues. And that is emblematic of a much broader trend of just growth in APAC. We just saw the announcement of a new Krafton title. I think it's The Bird That Drinks Tears. I can never remember which is the original and mistranslated title. But there's already a lot of excitement about just like Wukong, North American audiences who would traditionally buy from EA or Activision or Ubi are clearly shifting some and some and some of their appetite to those foreign titles that is making it tough. But then lastly, Chris, I've been saying that there is a way to look at that as a market which is taking advantage of domestic protection, also taking advantage of lower cost development, taking advantage of a 669 culture. But it's also true that we see a tremendous amount of innovation from those studios. I write new report about Love and Deep Space, which is the strangest title, but it basically said,

"Let's do a genre mashup that goes after themes that no one has ever mashed up before and go after an audience that almost no one targets and then on top of that, let's deploy that through themes and monetization mechanics that most in the West don't." It's a game that is a 3D spacefaring action sci-fi adventure, sometimes hack and slash, that's going after the otome genre for romance that primarily targets women and gay men, not exclusively, but that's clearly the focal audience. And so it's basically like saying, "Let's mashup romance with Destiny with Harlequin novels." And they've done about $2 billion in gross bookings over the last 2 years. A quarter of that comes from outside of China. There's 150 million in Europe, another 150 million that took place in North America. It's a segment that as much as we can talk about there being oversaturation of games that no one goes after and would have been completely

like challenging to imagine as a real market opportunity, but so it was.
That's probably where the optimism is. I mean, I spoke to NCSoft last year and they talked about that the rate rise of K-pop and Korean dramas and things like that in Netflix and this sort of place and they said the rise of that digital distribution, the the the streaming services has made it easier for people all around the world to access, you you film content, TV content, music content from different markets where perhaps it would have been harder to do so in in in generations previously. And which is the part of the thing that, you know, you mentioned Project Windless, I think it's called, is the name of that game that you talked about, but they was um has been able to do. But I guess it only works in a positive way for the West if it goes the other way, right? If we can break in with our local localized I say our, but the Western localized content.
It does look very similar.
Yeah.
I don't want to select American titles, so I'll use an American film and we can kind of imagine it. But like let's think of the Avengers, right?
Mhm.
The core Avengers, there were six of them. Iron Man, who was an American military contractor, Captain America,

who's a US Army man, Natasha Romanoff or Black Widow, who also works for the State Department, Hawkeye works for the State Department. Hulk is works for the Department of Energy, I think. Anyways, he's a scientist for the military. There's one member of the Avengers who is not an American government contractor. It's Thor. He's an alien. He's not even from Earth. Which is to say we have long been exporting
Yeah, that's true.
undimensionally American-centric. When you think of FPS, even when we take a look at Ruby, their titles are not always based in America, but they are rooted in American, right? Tom Clancy is not a French story. We have long had the benefits of a very large audience abroad. It is more novel that there is competition coming this way.
Yeah.
It is still better that that market is available abroad without question. But it's a real challenge. And when you take a look even in the United States, Free Fire is a fundamentally Southeast Asian

title, but it's remarkably popular in the United States. It tends to outperform COD Mobile in the United States. It's typically the highest-grossing mobile shooter in the United States. It is doing that primarily through the immigrant and descendant population in the United States who is doing it as a form of socializing or cultural connection.
Yeah, I was talking about countries, right? So I guess I do find the growth in non-core gaming countries promising, but I mean as your graphs show around and average revenue per user. I mean a lot of these markets are off pre-monetization. I think it's the term that a lot of people use. But we seeing a change there. We Do you think the industry is working out how to I know obviously the ARPU so low, but are we working out how to turn these huge amount of gamers in these these non-core markets, how we can generate money from that?
So when you're talking about this question, are we figuring it out? I think it's important to recognize that this kind of gets into macro theme. And I know you've been talking about it,

Owen's been talking about it, I write about it. It's a combination of this presentation is that we need to not think of there being a video game industry. It's become a little bit trite to do so, but the question of are we figuring it out? First and foremost, I'm separating myself from that we, but we use it collectively. Some are and some aren't. I think when Patrick is talking about the need to fundamentally rethink how they make games, part of that is spending 8 years and half a billion dollars just to have a swing as we've seen that may last only a few days or weeks before the game has critical mass or doesn't isn't sustainable. If you're going to say the only way in which we can compete with the tired giants is to spend that much, then it's kind of impossible to imagine how that's good for anyone. Shareholders, too. And so you have to be able to do something new and fresh and faster and more responsive to player behaviors. That's key, but then separate but you want to operate in markets where the average gamer is spending not $250 a year on content

as Americans do, not $600 per person per year as Koreans do, not even $100 as a Brit or Frenchman might do, but you want to succeed in dozens of dollars or less, you need a fundamentally different cost structure price partly because most of these games don't immediately ratchet into revenue. They don't immediately ratchet into high MTX even if they're popular up front. So you would need to not only work at low spend, but that curve to Brooke. There's no way to do that with a half billion dollars 300 million dollars of revenue. If you can crack into the domestic market that's one opportunity. Do I see more focus there? Absolutely. And I think again, we have to separate where is there a lot of revenue with where is there a lot of growth. The eight what I call mature market eight. These are what we typically consider to be the home markets. US, UK, Germany, Japan, Korea, Canada, Italy,

France. When you talk to most Western developers, they really target on US, UK, sometimes Germany because they know if those three work, the rest do okay. Those countries have declined in aggregate since 2020. And there's a fundamental question which is if I said to you you're looking at 60% of the global market for PC console is flat to down after five or six years. 60% What do you want to bet for 2030? Another half decade from now. We can talk about plus two, minus two, but I don't think we can possibly say plus 20. Maybe not even plus 10. The reality that you have to confront is those are unlikely to be significant growth markets. They may actually be the same size in five years as they are now. That means that any cost that you have incrementally can't be born by those customers. You have to figure out those other markets. Some are Garena

does 3 billion a year in bookings. The average customer spends only $4 per year. The average monetizing customer is spending $12 a quarter. They They make it work. And by the way, Garena does 55% EBITDA margins. They're not just having a huge top line by targeting those customers. They have an enormous bottom. But, that requires a very firm question on figuring it out isn't just how do we appeal to those customers, it's what do we build and how do we build it differently. And And here's the tough part. Who in our core markets are we excluding? There's a lot of talk right now about high fidelity graphics not having a positive business case where gamers don't even care. But, if you're going to say we are going to run on low-to-mid-level Androids, which by the way, are about 2/3 of all mobile revenue on Android globally, you have to talk about making something that your core customers may have to reject.
I'm going to bring this up again because we talked about this last year when you

were on. We talked about mobile, right? And we talked about We talked about we were very specifically talking about Resident Evil on mobile and how it hadn't worked. And you quite quite convincingly argued there were plenty of reasons why it didn't work. It had nothing to do with Resident Evil on mobile. It's, you know, when it was released, the size of the audience, the fact that, you know, the the high-end devices. It was It was It was a pretty good um argument. It was very convincing. Interesting, I spoke to Frank Gibeau at Zynga shortly after that. And he said, "Look, those sort of games can work on mobile. Maybe not really It wasn't talking about specifically Resident Evil.
Yeah.
But, they have to adapt to it." And he was talking about porting. You can't just port a, you know, a console game over because people on their phones are getting notifications. They're on the bus. They're at school. They're They're, you know, they're getting text messages, getting emails. And that's not necessarily the best way to experience a sort of story-driven adventure game or whatever. And things like that. And we know that there are examples of PC console-style games doing well. You mentioned a few of them there. Genshin Impact as well. Those sort of things. But, what that's got me to think about, what connects to what you were just saying, is is What does that mean for

the content as well? So, you're talking about, yeah, it might that you know, we have to do lower fidelity games, games that aren't super high-end, but um I think we see these stories around Netflix, right? About how because of multi-screening, there's been this recommendation from Netflix that you have to keep reminding the audience of the story and the characters because they're not necessarily paying full attention. And I do think that, you know, if you're going what's that going to do to like traditional PC and console games? If If suddenly the big opportunity the big growth opportunity for that is for those sorts of games is in mobile in the emerging markets or emerging markets probably the right way to term it, non-core markets. I I do have to wonder what that means going to mean for the games themselves and how they're developed. So, you're talking So, yeah, I was sort of agreeing with you there, but also adding to the fact that it might actually change the structure of the games that we're talking about in general and does that How do you do that without alienating your core is That's the million That's the big question, isn't it?
You're absolutely right. I mean, I think that there are a few different things in that are key here. One is just technical device support becomes essential. When

you take a look at most of the world, it's running on two gigs of RAM or less, 30 frames if you were lucky. You can barely draw things in the map that are more than 100 or 200 ft away. Like that all has creative implementations. We joke about yellow paints. But we don't think about yellow paint off of a 60-in 2K TV or a 20-in monitor that might be 4 in away from you.
Yeah.
So, part of it is device specs. Part of that is culturalization. If you take a look at the integrations or the IP and events of Free Fire or PUBG,
Yes.
they tend to focus on intellectual property that I've never heard of. I would gather you haven't either, but I won't put you on the spot, but they are making it again, not a technical exclusionary decision, but they're saying, "We could do an integration with the West's favorite IP, but resources are finite, windows are finite, development integrations are finite. Instead, we're going to invest in intellectual property that appeals primarily to those on those

devices. That's different, too. Monetization is a third one that you and I just talked about. How do you have the margins of the monetization to sustain it? But, part of it is game design, without question. They It is wrong to say they are less complex. Their complexity is in other places. Game design around how do you make a fast-moving FPS or third-person shooter where your ability to turn a corner or open a door is not like dual analogs? Hard game design, fundamentally different interaction model. But, to your point, you're choosing to do something differently. We all know the games where it's like duck, cover, mantle when you're hiding. Those all exist in most of the top or those exist in most of the top shooters, but you have to design differently. That's That's key, but I would say one other thing as I drone on is I'm very focused on this fundamental question of when we take a look at the mature

markets, again, those eight that I mentioned, when we take a look at the categories that seem most under strain, that tends to be single-player narrative. Obviously, gas is under economic assault and success assault. But, single-player narrative games are really having a tough time meeting historical expectations. Tears of the Kingdom drastically underperforms relative to Breath of the Wild, despite Switch being larger. God of War Ragnarök versus God of War, Spider-Man 2 versus Spider-Man 1. A successful title hit here might sell 15 to 30 million units at the high end. As you know, the game completion rates, you take a look at the trophies for Last of Us Part II, sit at the 40 to 50% mark. So, 40 50% of people will finish a 15 to 25 30-hour story mission. If you mash that up with other data, we see that the older you get, the more likely you are to have disengaged over time with video games, which is to say a man or woman 45 plus plays games less today than they did five years ago. You

know, that's the same cohort, right? Like the identical person.
Yeah.
It seems pretty likely to me that one of the ways in which that category is losing people is game complexity and narrative immersion has been this massive ascendant area that has made games more compelling and interesting. It has made them prime for adaptation to TV and film. But and you have kids, right, Chris?
Yeah, yeah.
That's not a faux pas to bring up, right?
No, no. I've got two young children.
You might get the, you know, the next brilliant single player narrative game and it really fine tunes your fast twitch movement, your muscle memory, your narrative, your understanding of side missions, characters, content, lore. What did you want to do and why? But you might put that device down for two weeks and you come back and everything has dulled and there's that Mario meme of, you know, Mario, we should go up to the castle. But the truth is like a lot of people, we see evidence of this, are really busy. They come home and they

are unfamiliar with what to do and that doesn't feel good. At the same time, their friends just dropped in Warzone or Fortnite, so there's a social exclusionary outcome. And so that is a long-winded way of saying I think there's a separate question here, which is not just design for mobile and ROW, but it's also a game design question around increasingly disengaged or taxed gamers who might pick up a controller, don't really remember what they're doing and by the way, as the game's loading or it paused occurs, they're getting 90 different notifications on their phone. Some of which are like, Chris, where are you? We just dropped. And I do think that remedying that, which is not a yellow paint question, but around perhaps like re-onboarding users is going to be pretty key.
Literally, I've got a perfect example of this is I'm a I'm actually a big Resident Evil fan. That's why I bring it up so many times.
Yeah, me too.
But I've got to a point where three and six, right? I don't get any TV time anymore, right? Fairly very rare. And

Resident Evil 4 the remake is only on PlayStation. And I've restarted that game three times. The reason why I've restarted it is I've got to a point in that game and I've forgotten how it controls and now and learning how it controls whilst facing a giant ogre coming out of a war tower is like that's not the time to I need to go back to the start. I also have to remind myself of the story even though I know Resident Evil 4 very well. I still have to I feel like I need to go back and start again. I've done that so many times. And it's interesting you talked about Zelda. To going back to this whole It's not even going back to it but it sort of also talks about what we're talking about. Nintendo are actually very good at making core games portable. You know what I mean? So I think of Breath of the Wild as a bit of a I don't know if they did it on purpose or not but somebody went, "You know what? Those dungeons that we used to make in Zelda games are three, four hours long. Could we make it Instead of doing that, could we make 100 10-minute ones?" And and I thought that was really really brilliant with Breath of the Wild cuz it's a game you can complete that game in 20-minute bursts over the course of a year, right? And because generally okay,

the game gets harder but generally speaking levels it did a very good job of that. Tears of the Kingdom interestingly which you could still do Tears of the Kingdom in those sort of bite-size chunks because it's so much more complexity in that game in terms of all the things you build and the things you add. Actually I actually found that game a lot more harder to get back into. Took me a year to finish that. Took me a really hard to get back into that whereas Breath of the Wild was actually quite quite moreish as well. Nintendo's very good at that. But it's that's sort of bite-sizey. I think there is actually probably for some of the market how Nintendo have approached making games for a portable and home console audience.
Yeah.
And managed that is is is some lessons there I think for anyone now looking to take their PC and console games into sort of the smartphone space. I think that's a um interesting point. But you make so many things you just sit there.
Well, [laughter] what? I'm true to me.
Yeah, I mean this is So I'm here to tell you this is This is a lot more fun than talking about the the odd numbers in this market, that market, that platform. What I would say Chrisby's Well, first of all, I think Tears of the Kingdom is

I can't say enough about how phenomenal I found that game. I'm actually one of the few lifelong Zelda fans who would say that Breath of the Wild didn't connect with with me the way that I think it connected with most people. Still outstanding, but not a standard. I thought Tears of the Kingdom was phenomenal. I can't say enough about it. But what I will say that rings true is Hollywood has a interesting view on this. Like let's take a look at video. Video happens to be the most successful media that has ever been created. People talk about that meme of video games outgrows the movies. Movies are a tiny portion of the video TAM. It's about 40 billion at the box office. Video does 650, 700 billion quality. It's way bigger than video games. One of the reasons why it does that is it packages a much wider variety of content overall. It's easier. But it's hitting multiple different things. Your session length is more flexible. Do you want 2 hours? Do you want 5 minutes? Do you want 20? You're talking about that a little bit

ago. There's also around placement. Where are you? Are you at the office? Are you at the bar? Are you at home? Are you at home ironing in the kitchen? Are you at home in the living So let's take a look at session flexibility. Let's talk about time flexibility. There's another thing that they have is less time slice but more mind slice or mind state. What are you in the mood for? Is what you want to do in Breath of the Wild explore, fight, collect, or problem solve? I suspect that when we take a look at an industry that is struggling with older audiences more than they used to and more than they should struggling with notifications of Tik Tok instant targeted dopamine or only fans fan duel what have you that one of the challenges especially for single player narrative games of which I consider myself first and foremost one of those customers is you usually actually are stuck into one thing right like you pick up RE I'm not

trying to say that RE needs to be flexible or more Tik Tok like I hate when people say that what I'm saying is that the challenge there in that category and it's starting to fold into game design at large is if Chris you have 15 minutes or you're just not in the mood for specific type of play or you're on the go and you've got your steam deck but it's not an environment for immersive horror you kind of get forced out right and when we do see a lot of the games that are succeeding in that category you can but I'll go back to love and deep space one of the great things about love and deep space is like if a customer wants to go on a date they can do a date if they want to prepare for a date they can prepare on a date they want to do hack and slash adventure earning they can do that all of those are available irrespective of the device time and mental state whereas other games in this hyper hyper competitive market for tension kind of lose you

if if it's not applicable on that
it's one of the reasons I've I've always said said this for like decades Pokemon is so such a competitive such a compelling game because you know if you want to pop into a piece of grass and catch a Pokemon if you want to level up your Pokemon if you and then and you can just do that and it's like that's 5 minutes 2 minutes the amount of times in Tears of the Kingdom where you know being up a game you know that I just booted up just to help Samson hold up a star sign and then I turned it off it was it was quite it was quite a lot but it was it it it and I guess that's that's that is that thing cuz interestingly cuz this is a question I was going to at the end, cuz this is something that I find fascinating is the old old aging audience, the old audience, cuz I'm an older gamer. And there is an increase in people over 50 and over 60 playing games, as you would expect as people get older. But um it was a I went to an event recently, and there was a a whole segment of a talk was about the fact that Gen X is approaching retirement age, right? We're not we're not we're not there yet, but it it's not that far away. And Gen X like the original games in many ways. And I thought that was it.

They go, "What's going to happen when suddenly you have a generation of people who now have the time they haven't had since they were young to be able to play games? Are we going to see World of Warcraft suddenly the most popular game in the world once again? Or is it going to be something completely different? Um I don't imagine it's Roblox. But um I think that's a really interesting opportunity, but I think probably key to laying that groundwork to whatever if that opportunity is even a thing in the future is um how are you engaging those audiences now? Because you could they could be completely out of games by the time they get to the point where they might want to come back, if you know what I mean. It's something I've been thinking about. It's just a hypothetical, cuz there's no data to to really base this.
Well, that that's kind of where it makes two things I mean what it is simultaneously true that that cohort is aging up and we see we see this all the time, right? It's like basically by the time you're about 28, your leisure time and media consumption time goes down cuz you have kids. And then you're in a high octane job. By the time you're about 50, your

just general appetite goes up. And so that tends to be a very bountiful cohort for two reasons, more time and a lot wealthier, right? You don't have a mortgage, your car payment's fine, you don't have kids, all of the rest of it tends to be very lucrative. But, and this is really important in most of the West, we are seeing year-over-year exaggerated declines in the share of that cohort that does play games. We are definitively losing that cohort. And we know that they're primarily being kept by casual view. So even if we were to take a subset which is say, what's the retention but let's define that by console AAA, it's really drawback. It is on average. This is where I talk about game design questions. I'm not a game designer so I don't want to pontificate that much but my point is more around there is nothing I hate more than playing the games that I always play and going through the two-hour tutorial onboarding. And it's just Yep, I get it. Samus lost her gear again. Dark, you know, like

why did Link stop using whichever sword and why did he let his Deku Shield rot? I don't know but like you accumulate and that's an important onboarding experience. I think it's a little bit weirder because nearly all of the purchasers of title N plus 1 played N. The challenge is what you and I just talked about which is it's not really do we need to learn how to jump as a Kokiri warrior? It's the question of like 5 hours in when we've taken a 10-day break, how do we re-onboard? And that actually I think is going to be more key. There's been a lot more investment here but I would just say that there is a mismatch between the general investment of tutorial as a first few minutes relative to where actually the player loss happens. Most games don't lose players after 30 minutes. They lose them much later. You put the controller down and you don't come back and that's partly because the map has expanded, the tools have expanded. You're like, holy crap, this skill tree, what did I have to prioritize?

Don't know. That's I suspect going to be a lot more important for that older game demo partly because and you see this all the time, it's like when there's QA or UAT, it's usually not saying like how hard is boss nine for a 58-year-old who hasn't touched the controller in 2 weeks. And I don't know about you, but like I still play a lot of like low latency shooter games and like in my 40s, I don't have the fast twitch I did when I was 18.
Right.
Yeah. That's interesting. Um I wonder if that's something that AI could help get out with. I don't want to use the uh the boogeyman.
So, I think that's actually a really interesting area where we can talk about AI in less of a threatening aspect. If we think of I mentioned earlier that meme of really dull and instructive audio that was famously brought to life with that AAA Mario video. We can think of I love the God of War series. Mimir never really rubbed up against me, but I

know that some people took issue with all of his tips. We can clearly imagine an area in which a voice actor is providing thousands of lines of dialogues, fairly compensated for contribution of their voice in response to specific prompts from the player who returns and says, "Mimir or Nave or Tingle, whomever, I'm lost. Uh what do I do?" And having the appropriate context to re-engage the player in a way that does not rely on clumsy yellow paint or an infinite amount of pre-recordings
Mhm.
or some form of inexperience dialogue written indicator pop-up that helps bring the player back. I think this is one of those areas in which there's an area game that I haven't beaten that I bought and played. And again, I think that when we take a look at most of the most beloved games of all time, the completion rates are terrible. Like they are. And by that I don't mean to say

that the studio should do better. I more mean in the sense of it is astonishing to me that when I think of some of the greatest creative achievements of this medium that only 30 million people have played the game and only 15 million have completed the narrative. That is suggestive of a retention problem. That I am hopeful there are different solutions, AI and non-AI, that can remedy that that aren't just about making the game easier or faster or shorter.
Mhm. What's our equivalent of a previously on? Is the It's not just a recap the story, but to recap what we've learned and how we can play it. That's a That's a good question. Um I'm going to have to press the pause button there in our conversation. Uh I know it's it's a great conversation. Um we will be back next week to talk more with Matthew. Uh in part two, we will discuss layoffs, game subscriptions, streaming, the RAM and storage crisis, in-game advertising, and PC handhelds. You don't want to miss it. That will be on Thursday next week. Um we're going to

have a show on Monday as well, which is our micro for paid subscribers, and a show on Tuesday, which is currently planned to be an interview with Fuse Games. That's the developer behind the excellent-looking Star Wars Galactic Racer. Um again, that is sort of subject to change, that one. We'll see. Um that's currently the plan. If you want to make sure you don't miss that interview, you don't want to miss part two of my Matthew Ball conversation, if you don't want to miss the micro, go to the gamebusiness.com, stick in your email address, um and I'll email you when I have a new episode out. Until then, though, thank you for tuning in.